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

Renoir Drawings @ The Morgan, NYC - Exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and pastels of the French Master of Impressionism

Renoir Drawings

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 17, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879

Pastel on Ingres paper

The Albertina Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection, DL535

While the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings, watercolors, and pastels are far less widely known. In fact, drawing remained central to his artistic practice even as his interests and ambitions changed over the course of a long career. This exhibition explores the ways in which Auguste Renoir used paper to test ideas, plan compositions, and interpret both landscape and the human figure.

Thematic sections cover the full span of the artist’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student, to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, to finished, formal portraits, to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life. In-depth case studies of favored themes and preparatory work for landmark canvases further illuminate Renoir’s practice of drawing.

Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers, this exhibition is the first in a century to explore the artist’s works on paper in depth. Organized by the Morgan Library Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and a small selection of paintings, enabling visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods over five decades.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director, and Sarah Lees, Research Associate.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

Mary Cassatt at Work @ Philadelphia Museum of Art + FAMSF Legion of Honor, San Francisco. A large-scale exhibition

Mary Cassatt at Work

Philadelphia Museum of Art

May 18 – September 8, 2024

MARY CASSATT 

Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog on Her Lap, 1878–79 

Oil on canvas, 10 3/4 × 16 in. (27.3 × 40.6 cm) 

Cathy Lasry, New York 

MARY CASSATT 

A Goodnight Hug, 1880 

Pastel on brown paper laid down on board, 

16 9/16 x 24 3/4 in. (42 x 62.8 cm) 

MARY CASSATT 

Driving, 1881 

Oil on canvas, 35 5/16 × 51 3/8 in. (89.7 × 130.5 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W1921-1-1 

MARY CASSATT 

Woman at Her Toilette, c. 1891 

Oil on canvas, approx. 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm) 

Private Collection 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Mary Cassatt at Work, the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.S. in a quarter century. 

Pennsylvania-born and a celebrated member of the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt built a groundbreaking career through hard work and artistic vision. For six decades, Cassatt was a committed, professional artist, making the social, intellectual, and working lives of modern women a core subject of her prints, paintings, and pastels.  She once wrote: “Oh the dignity of work, give me the chance of earning my own living, five francs a day and self-respect.”  

Mary Cassatt at Work presents over 130 of her works in various media to show her evolving practice as an artist and demonstrate her commitment to the “serious work” of artmaking. It presents new findings about her materials and working methods—which were advanced and radical for her era—based on detailed technical studies of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s significant Cassatt holdings.  

“Art was Mary Cassatt’s life’s purpose and living,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This exhibition will focus on Cassatt’s professionalism, her biography, and the wider Parisian world she inhabited.  It’s my hope that this exhibition will reshape contemporary conversations about gender, work, and artistic agency.”  

Mary Cassatt at Work features works from the PMA’s extensive collection, including some of Cassatt’s most celebrated paintings and prints, as well as loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Viginia Museum of Fine Arts, and private collections.

“We hope visitors come away with a sense of who Cassatt was and how carefully she constructed her identity as a working artist,” said curators Jennifer A. Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and Laurel Garber, The Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. “With this exhibition, we’ve sought to reexamine the full breadth of Cassatt’s art through the lens of her creative enterprise and draw attention to her commitment to ceaseless experimentation and bold techniques."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Following its run at the PMA, this exhibition will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART - PMA

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.philamuseum.org

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism @ Cleveland Museum of Art

Degas and the Laundress: 

Women, Work, and Impressionism 

Cleveland Museum of Art

October 8, 2023 –January 14, 2024

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Woman Ironing, begun c. 1876, completed c. 1887. 

Oil on canvas; 99 x 82.5 cm. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1972.74.1

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery. The first exhibition to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, the groundbreaking show includes the largest selection of these works seen together to date, only in Cleveland. The artworks from this series—revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class—were featured in Edgar Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from over 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.  

“Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”

A visible presence in the city, ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing, laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

The Laundre [La Blanchisseuse]ss, 1877–79. 

Oil on canvas; 80.8 x 56.6 cm. 

Art Institute of Chicago, 

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.102

Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)

Woman Ironing, 1892

Oil on board; 21.4 x 25.4 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.119

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)

The Little Laundress, from Album des peintres-graveurs, 1896. 

Color lithograph on China paper; image: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 45.4 x 33.7 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.151

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism contextualizes Edgar Degas’s laundress series with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard—as well as painters that Edgar Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs, and books, that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.

“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” said William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality—from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues—that have never before been seen together.”

Degas and the Laundress

Women, Work, and Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

Britany Salsbury ed.

Published by The Cleveland Museum of Art

ISBN: 978-0-300-27322-9

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring thematic essays by scholars of art history, French studies, literature, and history. The 256-page catalogue is the first publication to examine and document Edgar Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses. Edited by Britany Salsbury with contributions by Aleksandra Bursac, Michelle Foa, Gretchen Schultz, Charles Sowerwine, Richard Thomson, and Claire White.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Berthe Morisot @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Shaping Impressionism

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism 

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 

31 March – 10 September 2023 

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism, the first major UK exhibition of the renowned Impressionist since 1950. In partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, it brings together 40 of Berthe Morisot’s most important works from international collections, many never seen before in the UK, to reveal the artist as a trailblazer of the movement as well as uncovering a previously untold connection between her work and 18th century culture, with around 20 works for comparison.

A founding member of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was known for her swiftly painted glimpses of contemporary life and intimate domestic scenes. She featured prominently in the Impressionist exhibitions and defied social norms to become one of the movement’s most influential figures. Now, in a bold new retelling of Morisot’s story, Dulwich Picture Gallery will draw on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan Monet to trace the roots of her inspiration, revealing the ways in which Morisot engaged with 18th century art and culture, while also highlighting the originality of her artistic vision, which ultimately set her apart from her predecessors.

Highlights include Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875), painted while Berthe Morisot was on honeymoon in England, and her striking Self-Portrait (1885), which appear alongside Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman (c.1769) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection. Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher (1892), In the Apple Tree (1890) and Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte (1893), are among nine paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, many receiving their first ever showing in the UK.

Central to the exhibition is the story of the “rediscovery” of 18th century art in France and its impact on Impressionism with an accompanying body of work by artists including François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Antoine Watteau. After falling out of favour following the French Revolution, the art of the ancien regime was enthusiastically acquired by 19th century collectors and reintroduced to the public through exhibitions and new rooms devoted to its artists at the Musée du Louvre. Morisot copied works by Boucher; she experimented with red chalk, a technique closely associated with Rococo drawing; and declared her admiration for Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and Georges de La Tour. Uniquely amongst her compatriots, Morisot also expressed a passionate enthusiasm for English painters Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Romney.

The exhibition demonstrates the numerous ways in which Berthe Morisot engaged with 18th century themes, drawing on her depictions of everyday life, fashion, interiors and intimate scenes. Works such as At the Ball (1875) reflect the elegance of the fête galante tradition and 18th century portraiture. Hung alongside Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal (c.1715-17) from Dulwich Picture Gallery, a clear comparison can be drawn between the elegantly dressed and costumed figures and Berthe Morisot’s glamorous sitter with her 18th century fan.

Berthe Morisot was known for painting glimpses into women’s private spaces along with an ability to capture feeling and emotion. Works including The Psyche Mirror (1876) and Woman at her Toilette (1875/80) form a point of comparison and contrast with 18th century examples by artists such as Boucher and Fragonard, reflecting the different priorities and perspectives of a woman Impressionist working in a modern 19th century exhibition context, compared with male Rococo painters working for private collectors.

The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Lois Oliver (Curator at the Royal Academy, Adjunct Professor in History of Art at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in London and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art), Dr Marianne Mathieu (Scientific Director of the exhibition) and Dr Dominique d’Arnoult (independent curator and Professor of Art History at the University of Lausanne). 

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue published in both English and French. Edited under the Scientific Direction of Dr Marianne Mathieu, this publication presents ground-breaking archival research and fresh perspectives.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

November 14, 2021 – March 27, 2022

Pierre Auguste Renoir , Dance at Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund  © Museum of Fine Arts Boston, All Rights Reserved

© Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, its only American venue. Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston traces the evolution of this 19th-century avant-garde movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School, to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, to the frank depictions of modern urban life by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition highlights the artists’ relationships and their thoughts, in their own words, to underscore the philosophy behind this now world-renowned movement. 

“The MFA in Boston was the first museum in the U.S. to acquire a Degas, in 1903, and early patronage by pioneering Bostonian collectors ensured the growth of its now-extensive French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings,” commented Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the MFAH. “This extraordinary collection has a distinctive capacity to narrate the history of French Impressionism with nuance, depth, and flare. We are enormously pleased to be able to share this rare selection here in Houston.”

The exhibition brings together the MFA’s 19th-century- and early-20th-century paintings, assembled in nine thematic groupings. An exhibition highlight is a breathtaking display of 15 canvases by Claude Monet, painted over a 30-year period, featuring Monet’s most beloved sites. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of his immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement.

Additional works included are Claude Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect), one of the artist’s famed series of 25 depictions of haystacks in varying seasons and light conditions, exhibited in May 1891 and purchased the following month by Bostonian Horatio Appleton Lamb; Edgar Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli (about 1865), which remained with Degas, and then his descendants, until it was purchased by Boston collector Robert Treat Paine, 2nd; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s life-size Dance at Bougival (1883), with its swirling evocation of modern café life; and Manet’s quintessentially urban portrait Street Singer (1862). (John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the patron who bequeathed this Manet to the MFA, Sarah Choate Sears, hangs in the American Paintings galleries of the MFAH.)

An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working processes. These prints, with concentrations of works by Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt, illuminate the artists’ working methods and approaches to their landscapes, portraits, and interiors, as part of a collaborative publication venture. Pissarro sought technical advice from Degas for his etching and aquatint of a favored woodland view. Edgar Degas’s painting Visit to a Museum (about 1879–90), from his series depicting women, including his friend and fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, in museum galleries, is accompanied by three prints from that series that portray Cassatt; four etching-and-aquatint prints from Cassatt’s own series In the Opera Box (about 1880) reveal the avid experimentation of her printmaking practice. 

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It has been curated by Katie Hanson, Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, and Julia Welch, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is organized by Helga Aurisch, Curator, European Art. 

MFAH - THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005

Beck Building, Galleries 201–209

mfah.org

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist @ Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte + Other Venues

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist

Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte

Through January 2, 2022

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Self Portrait, ca. 1890

Oil on canvas, 11 x 9 inches 

Private Collection

Courtesy of Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston 

James Carroll Beckwith (American, 1852–1917)

Portrait of John Leslie Breck, 1891 

Oil on canvas, 13¼ x 17¼ inches

Collection of Max N. Berry

The Mint Museum presents the premiere of John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist, an exhibition showcasing more than 70 works by one of the first American artists to introduce Impressionism to the United States. The exhibition is the first ever organized by a museum to be dedicated to works by John Leslie Breck.

Drawn from public and private collections, as well as the acclaimed Terra Foundation collection of American art, many of the works have not been on public view in more than a century. In addition to John Leslie Breck’s landscape-inspired works, the exhibition highlights his exploration of new styles and approaches to painting in the years before his early death at the age of 38. More than 10 related paintings by John Leslie Breck’s French and American Impressionist colleagues, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, and Lila Cabot Perry, are also featured in the exhibition.

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899) 

Chez M. Monet, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches 

Private Collection

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Suzanne Hoschedé Sewing, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 7/8 inches. 

The Mint Museum, Gift of the Mint Museum Auxiliary and 

courtesy Heather James Fine Art. 2016.25

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

The Sketch Class, 1890

Oil on panel, 5¼ x 7 inches.

Private Collection

The exhibition is inspired by The Mint Museum’s acquisition of John Leslie Breck’s canvas Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing. “I have been an admirer of John Leslie Breck’s beautiful, trailblazing paintings ever since my first encounter with his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1990s,” says Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at The Mint Museum. “When we had the opportunity to acquire one for The Mint Museum in 2016, it was the perfect catalyst for the museum to begin organizing this exhibition — the first retrospective of his work since his death in 1899.”

“The importance of John Leslie Breck’s works and his introduction of French Impressionism to an American audience has largely gone unrecognized but is an important part of American art history,” says Todd A. Herman, PhD, president and CEO of The Mint Museum. “Through dedicated research and work by the staff at the Mint, Breck and his beautiful paintings will be brought back into the conversation of American art.”

In addition, a 208-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available. Stuhlman collaborated with leading Breck scholars Royal Leith and Jeffrey Brown to bring together Breck’s finest paintings, as well as to create the first ever monograph produced about the artist, which also includes contributions from Erica Hirshler, PhD, and Katherine Bourguignon, PhD. 

After debuting at The Mint Museum, John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist will travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee in the winter of 2022 and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa in the spring of 2022.

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist is generously presented by Bank of America, with additional support provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and the Mint Museum Auxiliary. Individual support provided by Charlie and Susan Murray in honor of Welborn and Patty Alexander, and Mary and Dick Payne.

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN

at Levine Center for the Arts

500 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202

mintmuseum.org

Impressionism in Russia @ Museum Barberini, Postdam + Other venues

Impressionism in Russia 

Dawn of the Avant-Garde

Museum Barberini, Postdam 

Through January 9, 2022

Abram Arkhipov

The Visit, 1914

Oil on canvas, 97.7 x 150 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Nikolai Meshcherin

Moonlit Night, 1905

Tempera on canvas, 55 × 80.6 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Paris was the prime destination for Russian artists before 1900. They could see works by Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir in the French capital, and they drew inspiration from the subject matter and painting style of the French Impressionists. Upon returning to Russia, they painted outdoors and sought to depict the fleetingness of a moment in their depictions of everyday life in Russia. Even painters who later became part of the Russian avant-garde developed their new art from the Impressionist study of light. This exhibition at the Museum Barberini is dedicated to the reception of French painting in Russia, a subject that has received little attention to date. With over eighty works, the show demonstrates the extent of their international visual vocabulary around 1900 and places Russian artists of the period––from Ilia Repin to Kasimir Malevich––in context of Western European modern art.

Konstantin Korovin

Paris: Café de la Paix, 1906

Oil on canvas, 60,3 x 73,5 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Nicolas Tarkhoff

Carnival Day in Paris, 1900

Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

“A brief glance at an Impressionist painting determined art history,” explains Ortrud Westheider, director of the Museum Barberini. “When Vasily Kandinsky encountered a work from Claude Monet’s series of Grainstacks in an exhibition in Moscow in 1896, he saw, to his confusion, a picture composed of bright colors––but was unable to recognize any particular object. This unsettling experience led him to renounce the idea of the motif in his work and inspired his artistic development toward nonrepresentative painting. While this anecdote is well-known, it is only a small piece in the mosaic of the complex relationship between French Impressionism and Russian art in the period between 1860 and 1925. Impulses from the Impressionists did not only revolutionize Kandinsky’s work; they were the starting point for numerous artists of the avant-garde who were to transform the Impressionist treatment of light into Rayonism, Cubo-Futurism, and Suprematism.”

As the leading European metropolis of art, Paris attracted painters from the academies of Moscow and St. Petersburg since the 1860s. Through their examination of the Impressionist style of painting modern life, they liberated themselves from the academic rules that governed Realist painting in Russia. Interaction with French painting inspired artists such as Ilia Repin, Konstantin Korovin, and Valentin Serov to produce works that in addition to the impression of the present moment also showed a sensory world that confronted modern life. Electric lights, shopwindow displays, and the architecture of the modern boulevards ofered them motifs that they treated with great painterly freedom. The visual efects of the changing times of day captivated them. The nocturnal illumination of streets especially fascinated Korovin and Nicolas Tarkhof, who made this topic popular in Russia.

Valentin Serov

Lelia Derviz, 1892

Oil on canvas, 67,5 x 45,5 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Olga Rozanova

Corner of the House and Bullfinches in the Tree: Winter, 1907–08

Oil on canvas on hard fiber, 63 x 51 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The practice of painting outdoors that was inspired by the Impressionists transformed Russian art and made landscapes popular. Repin, Vasily Polenov, and their pupils Korovin and Serov explored nature around Moscow and traveled to the expanses of the north. Painting en plein air and a sketch-like style led artists to motifs that expressed a zest for life, encouraging a shift away from the existential subjects of Russian art. The changing sunlight lent a guise of lightness and optimism to their works. In portraits and pictures of families, Russian artists linked candor with psychological depth to create their own style of Impressionism. Questions of national identity were just as important as the relationship to the tradition of Realism in painting. Impressionism, with its focus on spontaneous expression and modernity that transcended borders, gave new impulses for dealing with this.

At the turn of the century summer houses in the country became a place of refuge for Russian urbanites. Artists captured the carefreeness of modern recreational activities at the datcha in Impressionist interiors that are suffused with light. Studies of light effects in indoor scenes and in still lifes led to a new appreciation of these genres that had received little attention at the academy in Moscow.

A second generation of Russian artists in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century became acquainted with Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, painting styles that experimented with bright, unmixed colors. Like the French Post-Impressionists, many Russian painters of this generation aimed to have international careers and were interested in staying in the West for more than their studies.

Landscape painting became the first field of experimentation for artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich. They considered themselves Impressionists before founding the Russian avant-garde with expressive Rayonism and nonrepresentational Suprematism after 1910. Now that color had been liberated, painters found the energy that stood for the dynamism and renewal of a new age. Impressionist observation was transformed into the Cubist and Futurist manner of breaking down of surfaces, which was made absolute as luminous nothingness in Kazimir Malevich’s series White on White.

Kazimir Malevich

Summer (or House and Garden), 1906

Oil on canvas, 19,2 x 31 cm

Collection of Vladimir Tsarenkov, London

Kazimir Malevich

Construction in Dissolution (Three Arches on a Diagonal Element in White), 1917

Oil on canvas, 98 x 70,5 cm

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The exhibition includes over eighty loans from institutions such as ABA Gallery in New York, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Collection of Iveta and Tamaz Manasherov in Moscow, the Collection of Vladimir Tsarenkov in London, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan in Kazan, the Collection of Elsina Khayrova in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as well as from private collections, and it is presented in cooperation with the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden and the State Tretyakov Gallery.

The exhibition was curated by Ortrud Westheider and Alla Chilova. Various aspects of the exhibition’s subject matter were the subject of the 11th Symposium of the Museum Barberini in November 2019. The lectures held at the conference, including those by Olga Atroshchenko, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Rosalind P. Blakesley, University of Cambridge; Maria Kokkori, The Art Institute of Chicago; Susanne Strätling, Universität Potsdam; Irina Vakar, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; and Tatiana Yudenkova, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, are published in the exhibition catalog that accompanies the show.

Exhibited Artists: Abram Efimovich Arkhipov, Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné, David Davidovich Burliuk, Vladimir Davidovich Burliuk, Robert Rafailovich Falk, Nicolai Fechin (Nikolai Ivanovich Feshin), Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova, Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar, Georgy Bogdanovich Iakulov, Alexej von Jawlensky (Aleksei Georgievich Iavlensky), Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin, Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy, Aleksandr Vasilevich Kuprin, Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov, Isaak Ilich Levitan, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Nikolai Vasilevich Meshcherin, Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov, Ilia Efimovich Repin (Ilya Répine), Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova, Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov, Nicolas Tarkhoff (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tarkhov), Sergei Arsenevich Vinogradov, Stanislav Iulianovich Zhukovsky.

Impressionism in Russia: Dawn of the Avant-Garde

Exhibition and catalog: Ortrud Westheider and Alla Chilova

Edited by Ortrud Westheider, Michael Philipp, and Henning Schaper

Published by Prestel, Hardcover with dust jacket  

264 pages, 24 x 30 cm, 200 color illustrations

Essays:

• Tatiana Yudenkova: In the Land of Impressionism: Russian Artists’ Travels to France

• Rosalind P. Blakesley: Realist Impressions or Impressionist Realities: A Complex Boundary in Russian Art

• Olga Atroshchenko: A New Art: The Establishment of Impressionism in Russia

• Susanne Strätling: Perceptual Force Fields: Impressionism and Energetics

• Maria Kokkori: Color Is Light: From Impressionism to Suprematism

• Irina Vakar: Dissolution of the Object: Impressionist Traditions in the Russian Avant-Garde

MUSEUM BARBERINI 

Humboldtstr. 5–6, 14467 Potsdam 

www.museum-barberini.com

Claude Monet Masterpiece @ McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Monet and Whistler in London

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio

Through January 23, 2022

Claude Monet

Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard, 1902

Oil on canvas

Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario

Gift of Ethel and Milton Harris, 1990 

Photograph © AGO

Bodies of water have long captured the imaginations of artists, particularly Claude Monet, who often explored the magical effects of light and atmosphere on water at different times of day. The McNay’s exhibition, Monet and Whistler in London, features rarely seen artworks from nine artists in the McNay Collection in conversation with a Claude Monet masterpiece reflecting the River Thames in England. 

On loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard (1902) shows one of the major bridges over the 215-mile-long river and the Houses of Parliament in the distance. The artist accentuates the effect of fog as it diffuses sunlight into a soft, golden glow. Other artists were similarly fascinated with the unique atmospheric qualities of the Thames, including American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His lithograph Early Morning on view in the exhibition shows how the famous London fog creates a symphony of subtle gray tonalities.

Additional artworks include James Tissot’s Les Deux Amis (Two Friends), which depicts one man bidding farewell to another at the dock’s edge—a scene inspired by the excitement and adventure of travel. Winslow Homer’s Perils of the Sea highlights the dangers of the deep as women anxiously await their husbands with a roiling sea in the background. Additional artists focus on waterways as important arteries of commerce and industry, like Joseph Pennell’s Sunset, from Williamsburg Bridge or Otto Kuhler’s The Valley of Work.

Monet and Whistler in London presents many of these artworks for the first time in years, including John Marin’s studies of the Brooklyn Bridge. This exhibition also includes a contemporary woodcut by Yvonne Jacquette. Jacquette’s Midtown Composite focuses primarily on the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but also reveals a tiny sliver of the East River.

Monet and Whistler in London is organized for the McNay Art Museum by Lyle W. Williams, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Curator of Modern Art.

McNay Art Museum

6000 N New Braufels Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78209

www.mcnayart.org

Julian Onderdonk @ San Antonio Museum of Art - Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape

Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape

San Antonio Museum of Art

January 20 - April 23, 2017

The San Antonio Museum of Art presents Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape. The exhibition explores the work of legendary San Antonio painter Julian Onderdonk, from views of the Long Island landscape to sweeping impressions of the Hill Country and the iconic Texas bluebonnet.

Born in San Antonio in 1882, Julian Onderdonk trained first with his father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (1851–1917), one of the city's most important early artists. Julian Onderdonk further studied in New York under American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, whose mantra that an artist should work outdoors and paint what he or she saw forever marked Julian's work. After returning to Texas in 1909, Julian Onderdonk found his life's calling. He portrayed the distinctive surroundings of his state at different times of day, in different atmospheric conditions, and at different times of year to the delight of collectors and critics. Just as he reached the peak of his fame, his sudden death, at age 40, in 1922, cut his career short.

"Julian Onderdonk's work still influences the way visitors revere—and artists paint—the Texas landscape," said Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, Andrew W. Mellon Chief Curator and the Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American Art. "It is exciting to share over two dozen works with the public, many of which are from private collections."

The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

JULIAN ONDERDONK. A CATALOGUE RAISONNE

Julian Onderdonk and the Texan Landscape coincides with the publication of 

Julian Onderdonk: A Catalogue Raisonné 

by Harry A. Halff and Elizabeth Halff, 

who spent twenty years tracking down the works.

SAMA - SAN ANTONIO MUSEUM OF ART

200 West Jones Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78215

www.samuseum.org

Renoir @ Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid & Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao

Intimate Renoir
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
18 October 2016 - 22 January 2017
Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao
7 February - 15 May 2017

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Bathing on the Seine, La Grenouillère, 1869

Oil on canvas, 59 x 80 cm

Moscow, The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

© The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875

Oil on canvas, 54,5 x 65 cm

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

© Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Writing about his father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said: "He looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress". Intimate Renoir, the first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), will challenge the traditional concept that reduces Impressionism to the "purely visual". Rather, it will emphasise the central role played by tactile sensations in Renoir's paintings, which are present in all the different phases of his career and are expressed through a wide range of genres including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes.

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Le Moulin de la Galette, Study, 1875-1876

Oil on canvas, 65 x 85 cm

Copenhage, Ordrupgaard

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

The Promenade, 1870

Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 64,8 cm

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 89.PA.41

Curated by Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition will present a survey of more than 75 works by the artist loaned from museums and collections worldwide and will show how the artist made use of the tactile qualities of volume, paint and textures as a vehicle to evoke intimacy in its various forms (friendship, the family or erotic ties) and how that imagery connects the work to the viewer through the sensuality of the brushstroke and the pictorial surface. 

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
www.museothyssen.org

Legacy of Impressionism: Languages of Light at the Greenville County Museum of Art - GCMA

Legacy of Impressionism: Languages of Light

Greenville County Museum of Art - GCMA

March 12 - September 21, 2014 

Impressionism, the first bombshell launched against academic tradition, defined light as color, becoming the first modern language of paint. Sun-drenched and spontaneous, the 40 American Impressionist paintings from the GCMA collection found in the exhibition Legacy of Impressionism: Languages of Light invite viewers to consider the ideas and techniques that opened the door to modern visual expression. 

One of the most advanced painters and teachers working at the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century was Kentucky born FRANK DUVENECK (1848-1919). After enrolling in the Royal Academy of Munich at the age of 22, the precocious young artist progressed rapidly, and a host of talented American expatriates were drawn to him and his own fledgling Munich school. Future masters of American Impressionism, including William Merritt Chase and John H. Twachtman, joined the “Duveneck Boys,” as the group became known, traveling and painting with their mentor in Germany and Italy through the latter half of the 1870s. Duveneck’s masterful Steps of the Riva, circa 1880, is one of his finest achievements and depicts the watery highway of St. Mark’s Basin, the venerable stone facades and grand promenade of the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Another Kentuckian, ANDREW THOMAS SCHWARTZ (1867-1942) took classes with Frank Duveneck at the Cincinnati Art Academy before attending the Art Students League in New York. Schwartz became one of the most acclaimed architectural muralists in the United States, enjoying success with public and private commissions. Bathers, circa 1920, conveys his mastery of large-scale compositions and is typical of the artist’s panoramic treatment of the landscape imagined from an aerial perspective. 

AUGUSTUS KOOPMAN (1869-1914), a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before moving to Europe in 1887. Koopman’s grand Self Portrait, circa 1907, was probably completed during one of his excursions to Venice or nearby Chioggia, and stands as a summation of his years of portrait painting. Literally larger than life (the artist’s passport described him as only 4 feet, 8½ inches tall), it is a tour de force that orchestrates muscular draftsmanship and unusual deep, glowing color combinations.

Having lost his father early in the Civil War, GAINES RUGER DONOHO (1857-1916) was taken by his mother from the Mississippi cotton plantation where he was born to Vicksburg. After the war the family settled in Washington, DC, and Donoho was educated and later employed as a draftsman in the Office of the United States Architect. Drawn to a career as an artist, Donoho frequented artist communities in the Paris suburbs, such as Barbizon near the Forest of Fontainebleau. Consistently reflecting the distinct influence of the Barbizon painters, Donoho’s work of the period is marked by subdued colors and less radically expressive brushwork than typical Impressionist examples.

Mississippi-born KATE FREEMAN CLARK (1875-1957) left her native Holly Springs, chaperoned by her mother, to enroll at the Art Students League. Over the next 20 years she studied with some of the most important teachers of the era, including John H. Twachtman and William Merritt Chase. She left the Art Students League for Chase’s new school in Manhattan and spent six summers with him at Shinnecock. When Kate Freeman Clark began submitting her plein air landscapes to competitive exhibitions, she enjoyed significant success, showing at the National Academy of Design, the Carnegie Institute, and other major museums. Some scholars speculate that she exhibited under the gender-neutral name of “Freeman Clark” to avoid a presumed anti-female bias. Most likely, however, she concealed her identity because of pressure from her family, who discouraged her aspirations for an independent career as a professional artist.

While the American South contributed the considerable talents of its native artists, it also inspired visiting painters with its exotic landscape and indigenous culture. Charleston, South Carolina, with its picturesque Lowcountry environs became a popular destination for a number of American Impressionists immediately before and after World War I.

ALSON SKINNER CLARK (1876-1949) was one of the earliest Impressionists to visit Charleston. His sojourn there in the spring of 1917 produced radiant treatments of such sacred and profane subjects as St. Michael’s, Charleston and Philadelphia Alley. Clark’s contemporaneous paintings drew timely attention to Charleston’s precious architectural assets.

ALFRED HUTTY (1877-1954) and IVAN SUMMERS (1886-1964), two Midwestern-born artists working in the Woodstock, New York art colony, found that Charleston provided gainful seasonal employment and a respite from hard Northeastern winters. Before he began teaching at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum School in 1920, Hutty had already achieved acclaim for his sundrenched Impressionist landscapes, typified by Snow, Woodstock, circa 1920. After finishing the 1924 session, Hutty relinquished the Gibbes position to Summers, who taught during the winters of 1925 and 1926. During his short tenure in Charleston he finished a few small oils of colorful gardens and modest rural settings, such as Plantation Cabin, Charleston, circa 1925, that were richly rendered with classic Impressionist brushwork.

Another art colony denizen, WILSON IRVINE (1869-1936), visited Charleston around 1930. By the time he visited Charleston, Irvine had developed an unusual technique that mimicked the effects of light refracted through a prism. He applied this method to Charleston street subjects found in the historic district as well as to Lowcountry genre scenes he observed at the Cheeha-Combahee Plantation, a parcel of 10,000 acres that was assembled and purchased in 1929 by industrialist Frederic B. Pratt, President of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

The natural beauty of the Lowcountry’s rivers, lagoons, ancient live oaks, and brilliant azalea gardens repeatedly drew WILLIAM P. SILVA (1859-1948), a native of nearby Savannah, Georgia. Silva dedicated himself to painting at the age of 48. He studied French Impressionism firsthand in Paris, exhibited there, and, although he settled permanently in the Carmel, California art colony in 1913, he was active throughout his career in the Southern States Art League and often returned to paint in the picturesque coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. Reminiscent of Monet’s famed studies of haystacks and cathedral facades, Silva’s Sunrise Through the Fog, Runnymede, 1931, was one of a series of Lowcountry plantation paintings that explored in endless variations the atmospheric effects of heat and humidity on color and form.

GCMA - GREENVILLE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

420 College Street, Greenville, SC 29601 

gcma.org

The Impressionists and Their Influence, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock

The Impressionists and Their Influence

Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock

Through June 26, 2011

Organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Arkansas Arts Center, the exhibition THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE, is on view in Little Rock since April 1 through June 26, 2011.

In late 19th century Paris, a group of artists broke from long-standing tradition when they moved outdoors to paint. These artists, the Impressionists, captured the world around them in new ways creating colorful, light-filled scenes of carefree summer outings, riverbanks and seashores, private gardens, public parks, dance halls, cafés and the people who filled them.  

This exhibition brings together beautiful paintings and intimate works on paper by such French artists as Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, as well as works by major Post-Impressionist artists Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Paul Signac. In addition, the show features works by American artists, such as Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Theodore Robinson, who fell under the influence of the Impressionists. Featuring more than 100 works from the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Arkansas Arts Center, and private collections, The Impressionists and Their Influence is a splendid opportunity to explore the movement that became Impressionism. 

ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, LITTLE ROCK 
www.arkarts.com

From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

From Impressionism to Modernism:

The Chester Dale Collection

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

January 31, 2010  – July 31, 2011

Henri Matisse

The Plumed Hat, 1919

Oil on canvas,

© National Gallery of Art

Chester Dale Collection

Courtesy National Gallery of Art

When Chester Dale bequeathed his remarkable collection of paintings to the National Gallery of Art in 1962, it became one of the most important repositories in North America of French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some 81 of the finest French and American paintings―among the Gallery’s most beloved masterpieces― explore the collector’s passion and talent for acquiring great art as well as his tastes in modern art. This installation will allow visitors to discover the rich array of Dale’s bequest to the Gallery in the format of a special exhibition.

The range of paintings on view includes Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Forest of Fontainebleau (1834), August Renoir’s A Girl with a Watering Can (1876), Mary Cassatt’s Boating Party (1893/1894), Pablo Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905), George Bellows’ Both Members of This Club (1909), and George Braque’s Still Life: Le Jour (1929). Several sculptures, such as Amedeo Modigliani’s Head of a Woman (1910/1911) and Paul Gauguin’s Père Paillard (1902), will also be on view. Among other artists represented are Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh.

Chester Dale was an astute businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much of this energy and talent into his art collection. He served on the boards of several museums that hoped to be the beneficiary of his collecting, but his greatest devotion was to the National Gallery of Art, where he served on the board of trustees from 1943 and as president from 1955 until his death in 1962. Two portraits of Dale, by Salvador Dali and Diego Rivera, and two portraits of Dale’s wife Maud (who greatly influenced his interest in art) by Fernand Léger and Bellows, are included in the show.

A fully illustrated catalogue will present a study of the collection, with a biographical essay on Chester Dale as a collector, an exploration of the context of collecting in America from the1920s to the 1960s, and a chronology of the Chester Dale Collection.

A 15-minute documentary film will profile Chester Dale.

A selection of books from the Chester Dale Collection and related documentary material from the Gallery Archives will be installed in Gallery G-21 of the West Building.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART