Staying with the Blur: Notes from an Impressionism Exhibition

Staying with the blur: Notes from the National Museum of Singapore's Impressionism Exhibit

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I. The Placard

I always read the placard before I look at the painting. This is what I notice about myself at museums—whether it be the Museo Egizio or the National Museum of Singapore. The latter is where I am at today, convincing myself it's context. But standing in front of Renoir's Dance at Bougival, I wonder if it's something else.

In many ways, the placard gives me permission. It tells me this is important, this is worth my attention, this is how I should see it. Without that framing, I wonder if I might feel the wrong thing. Or worse, feel something I can't explain. And here, in this gallery, everyone seems to have received the same permission.

II. The Insult

The reverence is palpable here. Hushed voices. Angled phones. The unmistakable comportment of people in the presence of certified art. We've all read the placards. We all know what we're looking at.

Then a quote by Louis Leroy, from 1874 on the wall stops me mid-step:

Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

I read it twice, then let out a soft chuckle. A woman next to me glances over. The insult is right there, mounted on the museum wall alongside the art it failed to kill. Somewhere, a curator is having a good day.

My mind keeps going back to that quote as I move through the gallery. Louis Leroy, standing in front of Monet’s painting of a harbour, calling it unfinished. The ships were just silhouettes. The water was strokes of paint that only became water when you stepped back and let your eye complete what the painter had suggested. I think that was what bothered him. Leroy wanted evidence of mastery. Instead, Monet asked the viewer to participate.

The word "impression" was the insult. An impression is what you have before certainty. It doesn't let you stand at a distance and admire. It asks you to step in. I stand there a while longer, looking at the painting, then the quote, then the painting again.

But why was it an insult in the first place? I've been thinking about this since I left the gallery. Not why Leroy was wrong. That's easy, that's hindsight. But why the blur felt so threatening.

III. The Dash

There's a gift shop at the entrance with the usual array: postcards of water lilies, scarves printed with Monet's bridges, tote bags that say you like Impressionism without having to say it yourself. I'm reminded of the bookish totes with quotes from dead writers younger me used to collect. As if carrying their words to the grocery store proved something about who I was. I wondered how strange that might have seemed to Leroy.

I pick up a Monet tote and think about the Emily Dickinson one I used to carry. How strange that would have seemed to her editors.

Like Monet’s blur, Emily Dickinson’s dash asked you to trust something that had not yet settled into certainty. Her editors could not abide the dash, and removed it when her poems were first published. They thought they were helping. The dashes seemed wrong, unfinished. They regularised her punctuation and smoothed her slant rhymes into proper ones. Made her readable. Safe. For years, that was the Dickinson people read—eccentric, yes, but tidied.

Then in 1955, someone went back to her actual manuscripts and put the dashes back in. I remember reading about this in my youth. How one poet described it as, "Much more jagged, much more personal, much more original than I had ever thought her to be. Uncontainable"

Uncontainable. The dashes were not errors but breath. Interruptions that forced the reader to pause, to feel the white space between thoughts. Her editors had mistaken rupture for mistake. They had needed it mastered before they'd let themselves feel.

Today, Dickinson is on tote bags. The Impressionists sell out museum exhibitions. I put the tote bag back and leave the museum.

IV. The Pattern

That night, I thought about Leroy standing in front of Monet's harbour, demanding it be finished. About Dickinson's editors, tidying her breath into something manageable. About the word uncontainable and why it had felt like a threat to someone, and intoxication to me.

I flip through the photos I took at the museum. There's one of the Monet painting, slightly out of focus because my photography skills are minimal at best. The water looks even less like water in the photo. Just patches of colour my brain has to work harder to resolve.

And that’s when it hits me. The discomfort isn’t really about the painting. It’s about what the painting asks of me. A completed work lets you admire from a distance. But a blur asks you to step in—to finish what the artist only suggested. And that means revealing yourself. What if I see it wrong?

Thankfully, the placard had protected me from that risk. It told me what to see, so I didn't have to reveal what I actually saw.

I sat there in the dark, and felt myself slipping into Leroy’s shoes. I was beginning to empathise with him. To respond to something unfinished is to reveal myself. To respond to something unfinished is to remain constantly open to change, to be subject to uncertainty. The possibility that what I thought I understood might shift. That what moved me yesterday might mean something different tomorrow.

Maybe that's what Leroy couldn't bear. That there was no moment where he could say, "There. I've understood it. I'm done." The impression doesn't let you finish. It asks you to stay. To remain open. To be changed, again and again, by something that refuses to hold still.

And that—that's terrifying.

And then I thought: but we don't only do this to paintings.

We do it to people.

V. The Placard I Wanted

I know this because I’ve done it. When someone I loved withdrew in ways I couldn’t grasp, I sent them an attachment style quiz. "I think this might explain things," I wrote. They were Avoidant; I was Anxious. Just like that, I had my placard. I learned the patterns and named the withdrawals before I had to actually feel them. The label flattened them into a type—a problem with known solutions. The placard had protected me from participation; it spared me from asking what was happening between us in that specific, messy moment. My supposed mastery cost me the ability to actually see them.

VI. The Blur of Each Other

We all do this, of course.

We filter each other through "red flags" and personality scores. We offer ourselves pre-explained—INFJ, Type 4, Anxious-preoccupied—handing over a placard so the other person doesn't have to sit with our blur. The efficiency is seductive, promising a map of a person before we’ve even met them.

Those Impressionist artists trusted that our eye would complete what the brush only suggested. They had faith in our participation. What would it mean to have that faith in each other? To meet someone not as a finished thing to be understood and filed away, but as something still being made. The way Monet's water was still being made by everyone who looked at it.

VII. Back to the Paintings

But what if the surprise was the point?

I went back to the paintings today. Virtually, that is.

‘Standing’ in front of the same Renoir, the painting looked different. The woman in the pink dress is mid-spin, her partner leaning in, the background a blur of suggestion. I felt something that didn't have words yet. One description calls it a representation of working-class leisure in late 19th-century France.

But I was seeing something else entirely. The woman's face is turned away, withholding her expression; I’m left to wonder if she is exhilarated or merely breathless. The background melts into patches of green and light, a space that exists only in the duration of this spin. Amidst the blur, the man’s hand on her waist is startlingly specific, finished—a rare point of certainty in this scene.

I couldn’t tell if they were mid-laugh or mid-argument, or if their closeness was true intimacy or mere performance. The painting seems to know exactly what matters and what can be left unresolved. It doesn't finish itself. Instead, it asks me to stay, to return tomorrow and find it changed. It trusts me to arrive with today’s mood, today’s questions, and today’s capacity to see.

This is what I want: to receive someone without reaching for the placard first. To let them arrive incomplete and still becoming. The blur is not a problem to solve, but an invitation to participate. I want the person who refuses to be summarised—the one who remains stubbornly, surprisingly, and achingly unfinished.