Childe Hassam, “Point Lobos, Carmel,” 1914, oil on canvas, 28×36 in.

By the time the American republic began striding across the world stage toward empire, first as an economic and then as a military behemoth, Impressionism had become varnished with a solid coat of respectability—which explains why the United States has so many fine collections of impressionist works, from the national collection in D.C., amassed by financier and industrialist Andrew Mellon, to the several collections that dot the once-mighty steel towns of the Rust Belt. Economic power came to the American West later, but there are still fine, if smaller, collections in places like Denver and Los Angeles. Though French in origin, Impressionism became almost a national style in America, inspiring regional variations throughout the United States in the first half of the 20th century and becoming ubiquitous as prints in suburban America in the second half. The Utah Museum of Fine Art’s current exhibition from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blue Grass, Green Skies, provides Utah a chance to enjoy a couple of dozen paintings, focusing on the American interpretation of the artistic movement.

Mary Cassatt, “Woman and Child,” oil on canvas, 28 x 24 in.

So accustomed are we to the sight of impressionist painting, so habituated to its bright chroma and loose brushwork, that it is hard to imagine what those paintings must have looked like to their initial, skeptical viewers. Two works in Blue Grass, Green Skies may bring us closest to the sensation, if for no other reason than that they seem—and probably are—unfinished. In Mary Cassatt’s “Mother and Child,” a common motif for the American artist who spent much of her life in France, the two figures’ faces are relatively well-developed, but their hands are only ever so slightly sketched in, and they are enveloped in a swirl of paint that gives little definition to the background. In John Henry Twachtman’s “Harbor Scene,” there is almost as much bare canvas as paint. We may recognize the general outline of sailboats, one afloat and several others docked at the pier, but we would be at pains to describe any of the actual rigging on the ships. In front of both works, the quibbling eye may feel something else needs to be done (maybe much more), that the artist hasn’t finished, let alone polished, their work.

Impressionism was more evolutionary than revolutionary: its themes, its chroma, and its brushwork had all been explored in one form or another in previous work. It was a continuation, fusion, and expansion of various threads of French painting: the Barbizon school, Realism, Delacroix. And yet it still shocked its initial audience. Looking at the UMFA’s sister exhibit of 19th- and early 20th-century photography, one might suspect that Impressionism’s experimentation was, at least in part, a reaction to the camera (at a time when the sister exhibition argues the camera itself was chasing after painting). As an increasing number of people gained the ability to capture the drawing of a scene with the click of a button, painting focused on what the camera could not do—from expressionistic brushwork that emphasized the materiality of the paint to the bright color the camera wouldn’t be able to capture for another century.

Impressionism was imported to the United States through various avenues, including scores of artists who studied in Paris and returned to the States as part of the American avant-garde. Childe Hassam went to Paris in the late 1880s at a time when Impressionism was beginning to attract attention among American collectors, and he became one of its most prolific and successful practitioners. He was principally an East Coast painter, and like the Impressionists was known both for urban and rural scenes. In Blue Grass, Green Skies he is represented by a scene from the California coast, a strong composition that emulates the scattered light and brushwork of Monet.

William Wendt, “California Landscape,” 1920

Impressionism found a fertile home in California, where several prominent painters embraced the idea of working en plein air, whether along the coast or in the mountains. The varied terrain and bright light of the California landscape provided ample material for these artists, who embraced various aspects of the style, some more experimental than others. As the Armory Show of 1913 dumped a shipload of -isms on the American public just when it was becoming habituated to Impressionism, some artists chose to tame Impressionism, corral it into a regional style. Experimentation was not a linear event for all artists, so that at a time when Monet was wading further and further into dissolution, artists like William Wendt brought stability and concreteness to their landscapes.

Blue Grass, Green Skies is too small a show to follow any single thread of the story of Impressionism into any depth; it can only suggest with a feathery touch some highlights of the movement in America. One of the exhibition’s brief charms is the connection it makes between Impressionism and the development of that form of American realism, the Ashcan School. At the same time George Bellows was painting his furious, energetic boxers, he was also visiting the New England coast, painting colorful and emotional landscapes. His “The Coming Storm” is marked by his fluid, oily brushstrokes, yet seems miles apart from his New York wharf scenes or boxing matches at Madison Square Garden. A pair of works by John R. Grabach makes the connection more immediate, showing the thematic shift from Impressionism to the Ashcan School. The first, slightly urban scene, is devoid of people and focuses on early morning light on a winter day, not unlike winter scenes by Pissarro and Monet. In “Pushcart Vendors,” painted a decade later, the scene is distinctly urban, though this is not the bourgeois urbanity of the Impressionists, but rather that of the working class, where laundry hangs above small tenement yards and crowds of people gather around the vendors.

Works by John R. Grabach: From left, “Sunlit Houses,” circa 1912-1915,  oil on canvas, 27 x 27 in. and “Pushcart Vendors,” circa 1922, oil on canvas, 29×31 in.

Utah was never enough of an economic power for its museums and collectors to vie for impressionist works in the movement’s glory days, but Utah painters like the “art missionaries” and James T. Harwood, Harriet Richards and their circle did travel to Paris for education and reputation and in Utah developed their own regional version of the style. Among these are some of the best loved paintings in Utah. Blue Grass, Green Skies offers a refreshing opportunity to broaden our scope on the enduring impact of Impressionism on American art. It invites us to reconsider the familiar, to look beyond its comfortable ubiquity and engage with the subtleties and innovations that made it so revolutionary in its time.

Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, through Dec. 29.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.