Impressionism is perhaps the most viewed and most admired movement in art history.

Now a new exhibition, first shown in Paris, looks back 150 years to its founding moment

and to the darkness hidden behind all that beautiful light.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visits for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Two paintings from 1870s, France. A dramatic historical scene, honored as one of the greatest works of its time.

And something quite different. In everyday harbor view at sunrise by Claude Monet.

It would become one of the most important works of all time.

Place side by side as both greeting to the exhibition and provocation.

The fact that one painting from the summit plummets in terms of art historical fashion

and the other one is now, you know, central

to every conversation about Impressionism is striking. And we wanted to sort of put that

out there to sort of set up the difference, but also the moment, really.

Mary Morton and Kimberly Jones are co-curators with two French curators of Paris 1874, the Impressionist Moment, an exhibition now

at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art. The goal, to look anew at an inflection point in art

history, the birth of modern painting. From the start, we wanted to really dig into, particularly

the Impressionist mythology, and people

think they know what Impressionism is, but what they think of as Impressionism comes at a later date.

The fact that we call this exhibition the Impressionist moment is a bit of a misleading notion,

because in the moment they failed, but clearly there was enough of a success, a sort of a germ of an idea of how to move forward.

This is an exhibition about exhibitions. Two of them held at the same time in Paris in 1874.

And here we see works from each. The official Salon, the most prestigious art event of the day, defining taste and making careers,

but strictly controlled, conservative in its judgments of proper styles and subjects.

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