Today is October 4 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you taking risks?”
People who navigate the chaos understand that risk taking is often a prerequisite to forward progress.
The group of artists known as Impressionists took risks for their sketchy, light-filled paintings and for the fact that they established their own exhibition apart from the annual salon.
In 19th-century France, a jury chose the artists who could exhibit their work in the salon. Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and several other artists, chose to demonstrate maverick behavior and went against tradition. They decided that they did not want to, nor could they afford to, wait for the jury to approve of their art.
They all had experienced rejection by the salon jury and refused to wait a year in between exhibitions and wanted to sell their art to earn some much needed income. So, in an attempt to get recognized outside of the official channel of the salon, these artists banded together and held their own exhibition.
They pooled their money, rented a studio that belonged to the famous photographer Nadar and set a date for their first exhibition together.
They called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 to 1886. The first exhibition did not repay them monetarily, but it drew the critics who decided their art was abominable since it wasn’t finished. They called it “just impressions.”
The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the maverick Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style.
Poet T. S. Eliot wrote “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
Monet and others took a risk and found out just how far they could go and ended up creating an entirely new genre of art. Do you?