Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns showcases sixty-five works of art from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European collection. This selection privileges France as the artistic center of international Modernism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ranging widely in scale, subject matter, and style, these paintings, drawings, and sculptures were intended for public display and for private collections, and were produced by the era’s leading artists, those born in France as well as those who studied and showed there, including Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Fernand Léger, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Yves Tanguy, and Édouard Vuillard.
The works in the exhibition exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing a shift from capturing the visual to evoking the idea, from an emphasis on naturalism to the rise of abstraction. The exhibition explores the themes of portraiture, landscape, and still life, providing an opportunity for a multi-dimensional and flexible installation. Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-authored by Rich Aste and Lisa Small, the exhibition’s organizers from the Brooklyn Museum. The catalogue includes an introductory essay (with a general overview of the exhibition and relevant social and artistic histories), brief thematic essays, and short interpretive entries on individual works of art.
Image: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926).Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante àPourville), 1882. Oil on canvas,26 × 32 in. (66 × 81.3cm).Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1260
This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.
Lead funding at the McNay is most generously given by the Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation and The Brown Foundation, Inc.
Additional support is provided by the Marcia and Otto Koehler Foundation, the Nathalie and Gladys Dalkowitz Charitable Trust, Frost Bank, the Joan and Herb Kelleher Charitable Foundation, the G.A.C. Halff Foundation, the Director’s Circle, and the Host Committee.
