Salon des Refusés

The Salon des Refusés, French for “exhibition of rejects” (French pronunciation: [salɔ̃ de ʁəfyze]), is generally an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, but the term is most famously used to refer to the Salon des Refusés of 1863.

During this time, Paris was a breeding ground for artists of all forms, poets, painters, sculptors, etc.^[1] Paris was the place to be and the capital of the art world. Any artist who wanted to be recognized, at that time, was required to have exhibited in a Salon, or to have gone to school in France. Being accepted into these Salons was a matter of survival for some artists; reputations and careers could be started or broken, based solely upon acceptance into these exhibits.^[2]

As early as the 1830s, Paris art galleries had mounted small-scale, private exhibitions of works rejected by the Salon jurors. The clamorous event of 1863 was actually sponsored by the French government. In that year, artists protested the Salon jury’s rejection of more than 3,000 works, far more than usual. "Wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints," said an official notice, Emperor Napoléon III decreed that the rejected artists could exhibit their works in an annex to the regular Salon. Many critics and the public ridiculed the refusés, which included such now-famous paintings as Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) and James McNeill Whistler's Girl in White. But the critical attention also legitimized the emerging avant-garde in painting. Encouraged by Manet, the Impressionists successfully exhibited their works outside the Salon beginning in 1874. Subsequent Salons des Refusés were mounted in Paris in 1874, 1875, and 1886, by which time the prestige and influence of the Paris Salon had waned.

Émile Zola incorporated a fictionalized account of the 1863 scandal in his novel L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) (1886).

Today by extension, salon des refusés refers to any exhibition of works rejected from a juried art show.

Salon des Refusés Atlantique [1], established by Steven James May in 2001 and based in Halifax, Canada, provides a venue for filmmakers rejected by the Atlantic Film Festival to screen their work.

See also

• Avant-garde
• Salon (gathering)
• French art salons and academies
• Société des Artistes Indépendants
• Unjuried

References

1. ^ Ross King, The Judgement of Paris (2006), p59.
2. ^ Ibid., p57.

• Brombert, Beth Archer (1996). Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat. Boston: Little, Brown.
• Hauptman, William (March 1985). "Juries, Protests, and Counter-Exhibitions Before 1850." The Art Bulletin 67 (1): 97-107.
• Mainardi, Patricia (1987). Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867. New Haven: Yale U Pr.
• King, Ross (2006). "The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism" Bond Street Books, Canada