Impressionist Places

Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley came together as a group of artists in the 1860s. They freed themselves from the traditional pictorial themes of their time and revolutionized art with light-flooded landscapes. In 1874, they became known as the “Impressionists”, who preferred to paint in the great outdoors and capture fleeting sensory impressions directly on canvas. From 2016 to 2019, photographer Christoph Irrgang traveled to the areas and places where these artists painted for the Museum Barberini. He researched and photographed the places where numerous works were created from the perspective of the painters. The juxtaposition of the paintings with the pictures today show industrialization, modernization and urban development of the last 150 years, but also astonishing similarities. This search for traces in the places of Impressionism is as fascinating as it is revealing and opens up completely new perspectives on a great era of art. Art historian Miriam Leimer has interpreted the 33 pairs of pictures and asked Christoph Irrgang about his experiences during the research.