When we think of the Impressionists we think of paintings, no? But there was more to them than one medium. What this splendid little British Museum exhibition — one of a terrific pair — makes clear is that the Impressionists made good use of print, and the changes in technique over the 19th century made it possible for them to reach a very wide audience. Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and even Van Gogh are all here in the unexpected guise of printmakers, as well as women artists like Suzanne Valadon.
There’s a funny picture at the start of the show that shows a burial procession for an old-fashioned engraver’s tool; next to it is an oncoming locomotive, representing the unstoppable revival of etching. In terms of process, etching was far easier and quicker than engraving but was more personal than other mass-production techniques, coming as it did from the artist’s own hand.
Lithography was another process the Impressionists embraced. In fact, they used several techniques: monotype, soft-ground etching, drypoint, sometimes used with aquatint. There are lively Manet lithographs here: notably an excellent rendering of speed and motion in a few strokes in his Les Courses, and a charming portrait of his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot. Her own delicate prints of a duck and a lake — very Japanese — are nearby.
Actually, the influence of Japanese woodblock prints is everywhere here, as they are at the Tate’s current Aubrey Beardsley exhibition. Perhaps it’s time for an exhibition devoted to the impact of Japanese influence on European art generally at this time — everything from comic opera to ceramics, and certainly engraving. Henri Rivière’s lithograph here, of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, is made to look like a Hokusai woodcut print — and to emphasise the point we get an actual Hokusai, startlingly similar, next to it.
The explosion in printmaking, especially colour print, led to that distinctive fin de siècle form, the poster. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was in his element here — see in his exuberant depiction of Irish singer May Belfort with her cat, in unmissable black and red. Van Gogh, alas, only made one etching, but what a piece: the wistful Man with a Pipe.
The exhibition draws on the reserves of the British Museum’s own collection; a useful reminder of its breadth and quality. The same goes for the second cracking exhibition in the gallery’s permanent show space, billed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s birth. Piranesi is best known for his striking prints of architecture and antiquities; but here we get his drawings.
It’s often been supposed that these are interesting as preparatory sketches for the prints. Not so, or at least, not only. The impression you get here from the almost frantic creativity in these works is of a man working off the superfluity of his ideas. Drawings are, by definition, more fluent and spontaneous than prints; some of these are works of purest, ebullient imagination. One — titled Fantastical façade of an antique building with columns, heads and sphinxes — is a wonderful combination of architectural elements that were never found together on this Earth — Roman, Etruscan, Egyptian. Even in a preparatory drawing for a print, The meeting of the Via Appia and the Via Ardeatina, depicting an actual site, Piranesi refuses to be constrained by reality. He puts together elements he fancied for their theatrical effect, just as he pleased. It’s a monumental jumble, a Dungeons and Dragons exercise in fantasy.
What the excellent catalogue by curator Sarah Vowles makes clear is the importance of Piranesi’s early work as a theatre designer — the same goes for many artists from the Renaissance to the late 18th century. So in looking at, say, Interior of an Ornate Mausoleum, you can see it’s framed by a curtain, which makes it seems like a privileged glimpse of a theatrical setting.
Poor Piranesi was a thwarted architect who submitted proposals for projects and longed for commissions but alas, his particular style was out of fashion. However, he sublimated his ideas into his drawings (this show should be compulsory for architecture students). There’s a polemical aspect to his work too. Rome was his adopted city and he makes clear his view of the superiority of Roman antique forms over the competition. But it’s one of his earliest pieces that’s my favourite here: two skeletons, one sitting, one dancing, in front of a tomb. Improbably charming.
French Impressions: Prints from Manet to Cézanne; Piranesi drawings: Visions of Antiquity; British Museum, WC1 (britishmuseum.org), to Aug 9
