Painters in Paris: 1895-1950
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
March 8 - December 31, 2000
Painters in Paris: 1895-1950, an exhibition of more than 100 paintings by many of the 20th century's most illustrious modern masters — Bonnard, Braque, Chagall, Dubuffet, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani, Picasso, as well as others —is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Representing 36 painters of the School of Paris, including the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Surrealists, the exhibition — drawn entirely from the Metropolitan's collection — traces the development of painting in France from its Impressionist roots at the turn of the century through the aftermath of World War II.
"This astounding array of paintings by masters of the School of Paris reflects more than a half-century of collecting by the Metropolitan Museum," said Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Museum. "This collection has grown dramatically during the last two decades alone, as we have had the good fortune to gratefully accept a number of extraordinarily generous gifts and bequests."
Commented William S. Lieberman, the Museum's Jacques and Natasha Gelman Chairman of the Modern Art Department and curator of the exhibition: "This is the first such survey of masterworks from our collection, and it will be revelatory for our visitors. Not only will it recall a period and place of great vitality but it will also reveal unexpected relationships between the artists who so profoundly shaped the art of this century."
Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 contains acquisitions made between 1947 and 1999, including the notable bequests of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1967), Scofield Thayer (1982), Florene M. Schoenborn (1995), and Jacques and Natasha Gelman (1998); and distinguished gifts, including the Alfred Stieglitz Collection (1949), the Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection (1997-98), and many others. The first School of Paris painting to enter the Museum's collection was Picasso's portrait Gertrude Stein (1906), bequeathed by the picture's subject.
Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 is installed in chronological fashion, allowing for juxtapositions of subject matter and aesthetic affinities between different artists. It will begin with Pierre Bonnard's The Children's Meal of 1895 and paintings by Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard, although their predecessor Claude Monet is represented by a later example — Reflections, the Water Lily Pond at Giverny (ca. 1920). The exhibition concludes with works of the 1940s, late paintings by Georges Braque, Jean Hélion, and Fernand Léger, and three early paintings by Jean Dubuffet. Balthus, who is represented by four paintings, is the only artist aside from Hélion and Dubuffet born after 1900, and the only living artist included.
In the decades following Paris's Great World Exhibition of 1900, which brought worldwide fame to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, France was host to an influx of artists of varying nationalities — including Bulgarian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Mexican, Russian, Spanish, and Swiss — and Paris was central to the development of modern art. The painters who developed a new style of painting in reaction against Impressionism, and who exhibited together at the Autumn Salon of 1905, became known as les fauves, or 'wild beasts.' With Henri Matisse as one of their major figures, they used vivid colors for emotional and decorative effect, and Fauvism became the first of the major avant-garde developments in European art between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The Cubist movement, which originated with Pablo Picasso (represented in the exhibition with 23 works) and Georges Braque around 1909, is recognized as one of the great turning points in Western art. Cubism possessed a stylistic cohesion that set it apart from Fauvism. In analyzing the forms of objects into geometrical planes and recomposing them from various simultaneous points of view, its practitioners — Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, and others — created three-dimensional representational forms in a two-dimensional plane. Picasso and his colleagues painted images of poets, writers, musicians, harlequins, and women, as well as still-life compositions with recurring guitars, violins, wine bottles, pipes, cigarettes, playing cards, and newspapers — all iconographical accoutrements of the bohemian studio-and-café lifestyle in Paris.
Surrealism — a movement that sprang from the anti-rationalist philosophies in art after World War I and had among its precursors Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico — flourished in art and literature during the 1920s and '30s. Characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational, it was conceived as a revolutionary alternative approach to the formalism of Cubism and other forms of abstract art.
Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by William S. Lieberman. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
The exhibition was curated by William S. Lieberman with the assistance of Anne L. Strauss, Research Associate, of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Modern Art.
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