Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns

The McNay Art Museum is proud to present Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns (March 1 to June 4, 2017) in its newly reconfigured Tobin Exhibition Galleries. Curated by McNay Director Richard Aste and Brooklyn Museum Curator of European Painting and Sculpture Lisa Small, the exhibition includes nearly 60 paintings and sculptures from Brooklyn’s renowned European art collection as well as selections from the McNay’s prized holdings.

“Bringing Brooklyn’s French collection to the McNay is a reunion decades in the making,” says Aste. “Our founder, Marion Koogler McNay, was a visionary collector. Putting her keen collecting eye back on a par with those of her mostly male peers at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the nation’s pioneering art institutions, is powerful, appropriate, and long overdue.”

At the McNay, Monet to Matisse is organized by René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator/Curator of Contemporary Art, and Heather Lammers, Director of Collections and Exhibitions.


Indeed, the McNay boasts artworks from the same era—Modernism—and by many of the same artists featured in Monet to Matisse. To reinforce collecting-practice parallels between the McNay and Brooklyn and to highlight the McNay’s growing Modern art collection, the Museum is introducing paintings, sculptures, and prints typically exhibited in the main collection galleries to the Tobin Exhibition Galleries, along with key works on loan from private collectors. Notable examples include:



Paul Gauguin’s Portrait of the Artist with the Idol,



Raoul Dufy’s Seated Woman-Rosalie , and



Vincent van Gogh’s Women Crossing the Fields, all bequests of Marion Koogler McNay.


An iconic suite of ten Mary Cassatt aquatints, graciously donated to the McNay by prominent philanthropist and collector Margaret Batts Tobin in 1977

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Claude Monet masterpiece Nympheas (Water Lilies)

 An arresting Paris-made still life by African American painter Lois Mailou Jones on loan from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts.



Frederick Carl Frieseke’s The Bathers, an exquisite painting on loan from the collection of Marie and Hugh Halff.

Also on view in the McNay’s Charles Butt Paperworks Gallery is the complementary exhibition Sur Papier: Works on Paper by Renoir, Chagall, and Other French Moderns, drawn entirely from the Museum’s renowned prints and drawings collection.

Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns celebrates France as a major artistic center of international Modernism from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. At the time, the genres of portraiture, landscape, the still life, and the nude were redefined in radical ways. The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in this presentation exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined a hundred years, spanning early attempts to faithfully capture everyday life and concluding with introspective reflections of a disrupted landscape, beginning with the reign of naturalism and ending with the rise of abstraction.



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.


 
 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.