Monet – Cézanne – Matisse. The Scharf Collection @ Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf

Monet – Cézanne – Matisse

The Scharf Collection

Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf

March 12 – August 9, 2026

Paul Cézanne

River Landscape with Houses, circa 1904

Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 

Young woman with flowered hat, 1877-1879

Pastels on paper, 48 × 43 cm

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

The Scharf Collection – a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art – is being presented for the first time.

It continues the fourth generation of a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century, represented by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Despite many wartime losses, Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to save the majority of the collection and bequeath it to her two sons Walther and Dieter Scharf.

Following the division of the collection between the grandchildren, Walther Scharf, his wife Eve and son René developed the French focus further and added works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others. 

Claude Monet 

Waterloo Bridge, 1903

Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Pierre Bonnard 

Vase with flowers, 1933 

Oil on canvas, 99.5 x 48.5 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane Scharf specialise in international contemporary artists, including works by Sam Francis, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse. With a particular interest in the boundaries of the medium of painting and the relationship between figurative and abstract pictorial worlds, they have brought the family tradition of collecting into the present day.

An exhibition by the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

KUNSTPALAST, DUSSELDORF

Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf

www.kunstpalast.de

The Batliner Collection @ ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna - Monet to Picasso

Monet to Picasso 

The Batliner Collection 

ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna 

Claude Monet

View of Vétheuil, 1881

Oil on canvas

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection

Claude Monet

The Water Lily Pond, 1917-1919

Oil on canvas

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection

The ALBERTINA is home to one of Europe’s largest and most outstanding collections of classical modernist paintings: The Batliner Collection. It was turned over to the ALBERTINA by Rita and Herbert Batliner in 2007, opening a new chapter in the museum’s history. From French Impressionism, Pointillism and Fauvism (including works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Braque, and Matisse) to masterpieces of the expressionist artists’ groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (including paintings by Kirchner, Kandinsky, and Nolde) and on to the Russian avant-garde and numerous works by Pablo Picasso, this permanent exhibition presents all of modernism’s revolutionary ideas.

Edgar Degas

Two Dancers, 1905

Pastell auf Papier

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection

Kazimir Malewitsch

Man in a Suprematist Landscape, ca. 1930/31

Oil on canvas

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection

The 2007 decision by Herbert and Rita Batliner to turn their collection over to the public, along with their choice of the ALBERTINA Museum as a partner, enriched the museum landscape in a lasting way for contemporary art, too. Beginning at the turn of the millennium onward the Batliners began collecting the diverse painted output of the present era: Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Alex Katz, Imi Knoebel, and Arnulf Rainer.

ALBERTINA Museum

Albertinaplatz 1 - 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at

Edgar Degas @ Saint Louis Art Museum & Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
February 12 - May 7, 2017
Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
June 24 - September 24, 2017

Best known for his depictions of Parisian dancers and laundresses, Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) was enthralled with another aspect of life in the French capital—high-fashion hats and the women who created them. The artist, invariably well-dressed and behatted himself, “was not afraid to go into ecstasies in front of the milliners’ shops,” Paul Gauguin wrote of his lifelong friend.

Edgar Degas, French, 1834-1917

The Millinery Shop´, 1885

Oil on canvas; 39 3/8 x 49 9/16 inches

The Art Institute of Chicago DM003

Edgar Degas’ fascination inspired a visually compelling and profoundly modern body of work that documents the lives of what one fashion writer of the day called “the aristocracy of the workwomen of Paris, the most elegant and distinguished.” Yet despite the importance of millinery within Degas’s oeuvre, there has been little discussion of its place in Impressionist iconography.

Next year the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will bring new light to the subject with the presentation of Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring 60 Impressionist paintings and pastels, including key works by Degas—many never before exhibited in the United States—as well as those by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and 40 exquisite examples of period hats.

“This groundbreaking exhibition will provide a stunning experience for visitors while advancing scholarship of a little known but important part of Degas’ legacy,” said Brent R. Benjamin, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade will complement Impressionist works in our permanent collection, while giving proper context to Degas’ The Milliners, which the Saint Louis Art Museum acquired in 2007.”

Edgar Degas, French, 1834-1917

The Milliners´, c.1898

Oil on canvas; 29 5/8 x 32 1/4 inches

Saint Louis Art Museum, Director´s Discretionary Fund; and a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur D. May, Dr. Ernest G. Stillman, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney M. Schoenberg Sr. and Mr. and Mrs. Sydney M. Schoenberg Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Irving Edison, and Harry Tenebaum, bequest of Edward Mallinckrodt Sr., and a gift of Mr. and Mrs. S.J. Levin, by exchange

The exhibition will be the first to examine the height of the millinery trade in Paris, from around 1875 to 1914, as reflected in the work of the Impressionists. At this time there were around 1,000 milliners working in what was then considered the fashion capital of the world. The exhibition will open at the Saint Louis Art Museum on Feb. 12, 2017 and at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on June 24, 2017.

“This exhibition underlines the many facets of our extensive collection, which comprises not only extraordinary paintings and drawings of French Impressionism but also exquisite hats of the same period,¨ says Max Hollein, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The show presents a highly important part of Degas’ work in its extraordinary artistic but also social and historical context. It will be a revelation for many!”

Works from the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will be supplemented by loans from international lenders.

The exhibition is curated by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Esther Bell, curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade will be accompanied by a scholarly, full-color catalogue edited by Kelly and Bell. The catalogue includes contributions by the exhibition curators, as well as Susan Hiner, Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Melissa Buron, Laura Camerlengo, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell and Abigail Yoder. The retail price of the catalogue is $75 for hardcover and $49.95 for softcover.

SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM
www.slam.org

FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO
www.famsf.org

Théodore Rousseau @ Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Théodore Rousseau. Unruly Nature
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
Through 8 January 2017

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, begun 1834

Oil on canvas, 143 × 240 cm

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, MIN1783

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

View of Mont Blanc, Seen from La Faucille, c. 1863-67

Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 118.4 cm

Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund

Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

THEODORE ROUSSEAU (1812 - 1867) stands among the great figures of mid-19th century French painting. This autumn’s major special exhibition at the Glyptotek showcases Théodore Rousseau’s richly varied life’s work, where landscape painting became fertile soil for wild innovation. Featuring 56 paintings and drawings from 29 museums and private collections and from the Glyptotek’s own collection, this exhibition is the first large-scale presentation of Rousseau ever in Scandinavia, and the first of its kind in Europe since 1967.

Théodore Rousseau: Out of the shadows

Despite his considerable significance, Théodore Rousseau has long stood in the shadows of the subsequent generations of French painters – particularly the Impressionists, whom he can be said to have anticipated with his dawning abstraction and daring brushstrokes. Similarly, his role as standard bearer for the so-called Barbizon school has dimmed later generations’ appreciation of the full importance of Rousseau’s groundbreaking painting. Flemming Friborg, director of the Glyptotek, says: “Rousseau is much more than a warm-up act for Monet & associates. He is very much his own artist. This exhibition specifically aims to set him free from the constraints of preconceived categories, presenting him as what he is: one of the great innovators of landscape painting.”

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

Evening (The Parish Priest), 1842-43

Oil on panel, 42.3 × 64.4 cm

Toledo Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur J. Secor, 1933.37

Photo: Chris Ridgway

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

Sunset near Arbonne, c. 1860–65

Oil on wood, 64.1 x 99.1 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900)

Théodore Rousseau: Unruly landscapes

Théodore Rousseau entered the art scene at a time when landscape painting became recognised as one of the most popular and experimental genres around. Up until this point, landscapes had led rather quiet lives on the outskirts of the art of painting, serving mainly as the backdrop of scenes from literature and history. But now a new generation of artists began working with pure landscapes. Landscapes offered infinite painterly potential with their array of natural phenomena, capricious weather and changing light. Rousseau soon proved himself to be an artist of great scope and range. But to him landscapes were more than just nature. Painting became a prism through which he could merge sober observations of nature with his own feisty artistic temperament. Clear-headed renditions of details are combined with voluptuous brushstrokes to great effect in scenes from nature where the Romantic credo about the sublime is given unbridled visual expression.

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

Forest of Fontainebleau, Cluster of Tall Trees Overlooking the Plain of Clair-Bois at the Edge of Bas-Bréau, c. 1849-52

Oil on canvas, 90.8 × 116.8 cm

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2007.13

Théodore Rousseau, French, 1812 - 1867

Farm in Les Landes, c. 1852-67

Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 99.1 cm

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Willamstown, Massachusetts, USA

© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Photo: Michael Agee

Covering two floors, the exhibition demonstrates the sheer range of Théodore Rousseau’s oeuvre. Arranged in chronological order, the works on display demonstrate how Rousseau’s experiments cut across different techniques and formats, and especially how he utilized the synergy between drawing and painting. Open, receptive and explorative, Rousseau’s life’s work emerges as an extremely fruitful combination of fascination with nature and technical skill that helped formulate an entirely new vocabulary of expression within the landscape genre.

Théodore Rousseau: An unruly artist

The story of Théodore Rousseau’s career is of such stuff as myths are made on. Having been repeatedly met by chilly reception and rejections from the Paris Salon, Rousseau chose, in 1841, to entirely boycott this uppermost tier of the official art scene in France. A daring move that would usually have tripped up any artistic career. Yet things turned out differently for Rousseau. His absence became synonymous with the growing dissatisfaction with the Salon, and he was soon celebrated as “le Grand Refusé”. With political winds blowing in his favour, Rousseau was able to make a carefully staged comeback, casting him as a heroic martyr who not only conquered the art scene, but also won a seat on the Salon jury. Demand for his art rose rapidly soon afterwards – and did so at a time when the commercial art market began emerging in earnest. Soon his works were sold at dizzying prices, and far into the 20th century his artworks were among the most highly sought-after among museums and private collectors.

”Théodore Rousseau. Unruly Nature” has been co-organized with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which showed the exhibition from 21 June to 11 September 2016.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue (in English) that offers an overview of and insights into Théodore Rousseau’s rich and varied landscape painting. Featuring articles by the exhibition curators: Scott Allan (J. Paul Getty Museum), Édouard Kopp (Harvard Art Museums) and Line Clausen Pedersen (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek).

Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau. Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum

209 pages, lavishly illustrated.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Dantes Plads 7, Copenhagen 1556
www.glyptoteket.com

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism – Exhibition at Aquavella Galleries, NYC

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through November 30, 2011

GEORGES BRAQUE: PIONEER OF MODERNISM, a retrospective of seminal paintings curated by Dieter Buchhart, is on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition include over forty major paintings and papiers collés by the artist, all on loan from prestigious international public and private collections. The exhibition marks the first major Braque retrospective in the United States since the Guggenheim Museum’s celebrated exhibition in 1988.

Best known as the co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso* and as the inventor of the papier collé technique, Georges Braque’s legacy is better understood in the context of his lasting influence on artists for the past century. “The purpose of this retrospective is to present the artist not only as the cocreator of Fauvism and Cubism but also as a profoundly passionate, progressive and influential painter all the years of his life, well beyond his early triumphs,” explained William Acquavella.

As a young man, Georges Braque was a leading member of the Fauves, together with Henri Matisse, André Dérain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, before being inspired by the structured compositions of Paul Cézanne. This adherence to structure would guide Braque for the remainder of his career, especially during his close six-year collaboration with Picasso.

Together, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented a new aesthetic by portraying their subjects from multiple vantage points. They created a new pictorial world in which an object was deconstructed and then reconstructed on the basis of geometric criteria. They used forms that resembled geometric cubes, leading art critic Louis Vauxcelles to assign the name “Cubism” to the new movement. Still lifes became Braque’s preferred vehicle for innovation, and he was celebrated for instilling the most everyday objects with a profound spirituality usually reserved for devotional painting. Georges Braque described his fascination with the genre, “A lemon and an orange side by side cease to be a lemon and an orange and become fruit. The mathematicians follow this law; so do we.” In addition to fruit, other familiar objects such as tobacco pouches and musical instruments became frequent sources of inspiration.

At seventy-nine, Georges Braque became the first living artist to be accorded a solo exhibition at The Louvre museum and was awarded state honors at his funeral in 1963. His work is held in the permanent collections of the world’s foremost museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Collection, London; The Albertina, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthaus Zurich; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; many of whom have loaned work for the exhibition.

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism, Exhibition catalogue, 2011
Photo © and Courtesy Acquavella Galleries, New York

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism is accompanied by a 160 page hardcover catalogue which will include essays by Dieter Buchhart, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Richard Shiff.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK, NY
www.acquavellagalleries.com

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 8, 2012

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 - Exhibition in Paris and Montpellier at the Grand Palais and Fabre Museum

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 

Grand Palais - Galeries nationales, Paris 

23 March - 20 June 2011 

Musée Fabre, Montpellier 

7 July - 16 october 2011 

The exhibition ODILE REDON: PRINCE OF DREAMS, 1840-1916 is on view in France in Paris through June 2011 and will be on view in Montpellier (South of France) at Fabre museum from July to October 2011. An exhibition organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay and the musée Fabre de Montpellier Agglomération. With special support from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  

Although he was a contemporary of the Impressionists (he took part in the group’s last exhibition in 1886), ODILON REDON (Bordeaux 1840 - Paris 1916) remains the champion of mystery and the subconscious in a period which focused on reality and objectivity. One of the leaders in the art world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was a key figure in early symbolism, with his charcoals and lithographs (the famous noirs -blacks) before being admired for his pastels and paintings by the young generation of artists in love with colour, the Nabis and the Fauves. He was then regarded as one of the precursors of surrealism. 

The exhibition in the Galeries nationales-Grand Palais is a real rediscovery of this artist. A number of major exhibitions have recently been devoted to him in other parts of the world -Chicago and London, 1994; Frankfurt, 2007-, but this retrospective is the first in Paris since the exhibition in the Orangerie in 1956. It is based on the study of many unpublished documents which shed new light on Redon’s work. In particular it makes systematic use of his “book of reason” (Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet), in which he jotted down the titles and dates of his works. The book is on display and was published in the appendix to the catalogue. 

Some hundred and eighty paintings, pastels, charcoals and drawings, many unpublished, and a major set of engravings and lithographs (about a hundred prints, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France-French National Library, Paris) are arranged in chronological  order to emphasise the development in Redon’s style and themes, from the anguished period of the Noirs to the explosion of colour in his last works, in a gradual progression from shade to light. For the first time, the great mural that he painted for his patron Robert de Domecy will be displayed in its original size and layout. Redon’s work in the decorative arts will also be on show, thanks to major loans from the Mobilier national. 

ODILON REDON BIOGRAPHY

Despite the overall continuity of Odilon Redon' style throughout his career, three periods can be distinguished.  

Odilon Redon: Early years to 1890 

From Odilon Redon’ youth and his training in etching under the mysterious Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) in Bordeaux, until the beginning of the Noirs [Blacks] (charcoal drawings, lithographs) which, from his first collection of lithographs (Dans le Reve [In the Dream], 1879), made his reputation in the budding symbolism movement, particularly in literary circles. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) paid homage to him in his famous novel A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), whose archetypal refined, decadent hero fervently collected Redon’s  work. His references are Darwin and the mysteries of the origins of the world but also the sumptuous macabre works of Edgar Allen Poe and Goya. The extraordinary beauty of his lithographs is due to an accomplished technique and velvety blacks, which were said to be inimitable. 

Odilon Redon: From 1892 the end of the century 

This is the period when the dreams of the Noirs were gradually transposed into colour. Yeux clos (Closed Eyes 1890, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), of which there is a painting and a lithograph, is a turning point after which Redon approached colour in a new spirit. He used pastel with startling originality and, alongside Degas, is still one of the great masters of this medium. He became a major figure in symbolism, and mixed with Mallarmé and Gauguin.  

Odilon Redon in the twentieth century 

After 1899, Redon gave up lithography and charcoal drawing. Black and white gave way to vivid colour in increasingly large formats. Collectors competed for his mythological themes and brightly coloured flower paintings, a sign of his new peace of mind. It was during this period that Redon produced some of the great decorations which number among the lesser known masterpieces of the twentieth century, including the one in the Fontfroide abbey, which will be open to the public while the exhibition is showing at the Musée Fabre (Fabre museum) in Montpellier, in summer 2010. He won the admiration of Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and the Fauves and in his last years he designed tapestry cartoons for the Manufacture des Gobelins. 

Head curator: Rodolphe Rapetti, general heritage curator, associate researcher at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art [National Institute of Art History, Paris]

Curators: 

Marie-Pierre Salé, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay [Orsay Museum, Paris]

Valérie Sueur-Hermel, curator of the Print and Photography department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [French National Library, Paris], head of the 19th century collections 

Exhibition design: Hubert Le Gall  

RMN - GRAND PALAIS, PARIS 

www.rmn.fr 

Information, tickets, download of audioguides on the website 

Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Recovered Pissarro Painting at Worcester Art Museum

Worcester Art Museum Acquires Recovered Pissarro Painting

The Worcester Art Museum has acquired Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny a Dieppe, Temps Gris (Harbor at Dieppe), a painting by Camille Pissarro, which was formerly owned by Worcester philanthropists Robert and Helen Stoddard. The Museum will acquire this important French Impressionist work through the Stoddard Acquisition Fund, which is used solely for purchasing art.

Once it arrives at the Worcester Art Museum, the painting will undergo a conservation treatment in preparation for Pissarro and Other Masters: The Stoddard Legacy, which will open in February 2000. This show will feature the Pissarro and other works that once hung in the Stoddard home, as well as the art the Museum purchased in the last two decades with proceeds from the Stoddard Acquisition Fund. After the Stoddard Charitable Trust established this sizeable fund in 1979, the Museum was able to add significantly to its permanent collection many distinguished works of art ranging from a 17th-century portrait by Dutch master Frans Hals, to a vibrant genre scene by Jacob Lawrence, the most noted 20th-century African American artist.

"Helen and Robert Stoddard were great lovers of art and had a wonderful relationship with the Worcester Art Museum starting in the 1940s," says James A. Welu, director of the Worcester Art Museum. "In addition to their great leadership and extensive volunteer efforts, they enabled us to acquire many fine works of art over the years, and we are extremely grateful for their friendship and generosity. I am particularly pleased that Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris will be added to the permanent collection of the Worcester Art Museum, which was the wish of Mrs. Stoddard." This painting, which dates from 1902, joins an earlier work by Pissarro, L'ille Lacroix à Rouen, which was painted in 1873 and came to the Museum through the estate of Robert W. Stoddard.

Stole from the Stoddard's Worcester home in 1978, Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris was lost for two decades. After the theft, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company reimbursed the Stoddards for their loss. On October 22, 1998, the FBI seized the painting from Wolf's Auction Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time of the seizure, the painting was about to be sold after Ohio businessman Daniel Zivko and Kenneth Bement had consigned it to the gallery. On April 8, 1999, Zivko, Bement, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, the Stoddard estate, and the Worcester Art Museum settled the matter in a Cleveland court cast. The decision will result in the painting coming to the Worcester Art Museum for its permanent collection.

French Impressionism was a favorite of the Stoddards, who collected other masters from this school, including Renoir and Sisley. Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris hung over the Stoddard's mantle piece from 1951 to 1978. After the theft of this painting, the Stoddards acquired several other pictures, including Pissarro's L'ille Lacroix à Rouen, which took the treasured spot over the mantlepiece. Both of these Pissarro paintings will now hang together for the first time ever, at the Worcester Art Museum.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), was a prolific artist, creating more than 1,800 paintings in his lifetime. Born to a Jewish family in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Pissarro attended boarding school in the suburbs of Paris where the headmaster encouraged his artistic talents. After working in the family business for a short time, Pissarro returned to Paris in 1855 to pursue an artistic career. He had a strong and deliberate style that featured a highly disciplined method of working, including a light palette and a varied application of paint.

Known as the "patriarch of French Impressionism," Pissarro was a moral and artistic role model to many of the famous French Impressionists, including Renoir, Monet, and Sisley. Pissarro had a particularly strong influence on Cézanne and Gauguin.

A peaceful but committed renegade, Pissarro helped organize the eight French Impressionist exhibitions in protest of the official Salon. He was the only member of the Impressionists to participate in all eight of these exhibitions. His style was called simple and naïeve by some, but always honest. His was devoted to artistic truth and his fellow men.

In 1886-87, Pissarro joined the ranks of the Neo-Impressionists and took up the pointillist technique (separating colors into little dots). This led to the estrangement of his critics and admirers. He returned to Impressionism and once again painted rural scenes and cityscapes, such as the painting the Worcester Art Museum recently acquired.

Camille Pissarro sold few paintings during his lifetime. He lost nearly 1,500 paintings representing 20 years of work during the Franco-Prussian War, adding to his financial dilemma. To support his wife and eight children, Pissarro tried other artistic pursuits such as painting fans, blinds and shop signs, as well as making etchings.

Camille Pissarro's writings, including his many letters to his son Lucien, are one of the most important documents on the beliefs of the Impressionists. His letters also reveal a great deal about his own personal aspirations. In one of his letters to Lucien, Pissarro wrote: "Painting, art in general, is what enchants me - it is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits."

The Worcester Art Museum is honored to add Camille Pissarro's Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny Dieppe, Temps Gris to its permanent collection in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Stoddard.

Worcester Art Museum

Worcester, Mass.

www.worcester.org

Delacroix: The Late Work, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Delacroix: The Late Work
Philadelphia Museum of Art
September 15, 1998 - January 3, 1999

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the artist's birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Delacroix: The Late Work, an exhibition exploring the final years of the great French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Some 70 paintings and 40 works on paper by one of the most important artists of the 19th century, lent by museums and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas, are arranged by theme in six categories—animals, allegory and mythology, flowers and landscapes, literary illustrations, scenes of North Africa, and religion—that reveal the artist's immense achievement during the last 15 years of his life. 

Delacroix: The Late Work sheds new light on this monumental figure in the history of art, whom the renowned French poet Charles Baudelaire described in 1845 as "the most original painter of ancient or modern times." Considered the last "Old Master," Delacroix consciously placed himself in the painterly tradition of Veronese, Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, yet he was also the driving force in the French Romantic Movement, a radical new approach to art developed in Paris in the early decades of the 1800s. Delacroix formed the link between the traditions of the past and the modern movements, ultimately having a profound influence upon the Impressionists, particularly Renoir and Cézanne, as well as such 20th-century masters as Picasso and Matisse. Cézanne said that Delacroix had "the greatest palette of France, and no one beneath our skies possessed to a greater extent the vibration of color. We all paint through him."

Eugène Delacroix was a remarkably prolific artist, creating in his lifetime over 850 paintings and more than 2000 watercolors and drawings. This exhibition focuses on the works of the mature artist, from the year 1848 to his death in 1863 at the age of 65. These last years of his life were a time of profound reflection for Delacroix, steeped in nostalgia and swept by deep, erotically charged, emotions. Among the great admirers of Delacroix's talent was the American novelist Henry James, who in 1872 remarked that the painter's "imaginative impulse begins where that of most painters ends."

The exhibition features a selection of Eugène Delacroix's late representations of North Africa, a place where the artist had spent several months in 1832. It was a visit that would have a profound effect on the light, color, and imagery of his painting for the rest of his life. These subjects, reconsidered some 30 years after his actual experience, are a vivid testimony to his love of North Africa and its hold on his imagination. Delacroix will conclude with an exploration of the artist's representations of religious subjects. It is one of the great paradoxes of modern art history that Delacroix, a worldly Parisian who confessed skepticism of any organized religion, should be the greatest religious painter of the 19th century. This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to examine the range and power Delacroix's biblical subjects, such as The Good Samaritan (c. 1850; Waterhouse Collection), which were executed with a deep awareness of similar works by such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and Veronese, as well as the sequence of closely related compositions of Christ on the Sea of Galilee that also look forward to Monet's famous series paintings.

Delacroix: The Late Work presents paintings and works on paper that are multi-faceted and introspective, suffused by an increasingly complex and passionate use of color as well as a renewed spiritual intensity. Soon after the artist's death, Théophile Silvestre spoke to these same qualities in the final years of the artist's life: "Delacroix died, almost smiling...a painter of great genius, who had the sun in his head and storms in his heart, who for forty years played the entire keyboard of human emotion, and whose grandiose, terrible, and delicate brushes passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers and from tigers to flowers."

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 350-page catalogue, with essays on subjects including Delacroix's technique, how the artist was viewed by his contemporaries, and issues of continuity and variation in his work.

The exhibition has been organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in conjunction with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in Paris. The curators of the exhibition are Joseph J. Rishel, Senior Curator of European Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Arlette Sérullaz, Curator of Prints at the Musée du Louvre and Director of the Musée Delacroix; and Vincente Pomarède, Chief Curator of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the exhibition's only venue in North America.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
www.philamuseum.org