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MUSCARELLE MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS MAJOR IMPRESSIONISM EXHIBITION
Through January 22, 2012
The Muscarelle Museum of Art will be the only mid-Atlantic venue for Seeing Colors: Secrets of the Impressionists, an exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The exhibition showcases fifty paintings, drawings, and prints by renowned artists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent to illustrate the emergence of Impressionism in the 1870s France, the evolution to Post-Impressionism, and later influence on American artists. Included in the exhibition is Monet’s iconic masterpiece, Houses of Parliament in the Fog debuting for first time in Virginia. Seeing Colors will be on view October 22, 2011–January 22, 2012.
The exhibition begins with works by pre-Impressionist artists, such as Eugène Boudin, to mark the initial transition from the traditional, academic paintings of the Paris Salon to the loose brushwork and airy landscapes that defined the Impressionist movement. Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Frédéric Bazille, the founders of Impressionism, illustrate this radical departure and further convey the fascination with light filled color and broken brushwork.
Claude Monet 'Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil', 1873, oil on canvas
Despite its initial unpopularity with the public, Impressionism spread among artistic circles in France. By the late 1880s, Impressionism produced various off-shoots that emerged in France that have been called Post-Impressionist. This latter phase of Impressionism is represented by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard.
Claude Monet, 'Le Parlement de Londres ou Londres', between 1900 and 1901, Oil on canvas
Artists living abroad, such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, were among the first American painters to adopt Impressionism. By the end of the nineteenth, Impressionism and Post Impressionism became popular in continental America. Paintings in the High Museum of Art collection by John Henry Twachtman, Childe Hassam, and Theodore Robinson reveal these artists’ indebtedness to the Impressionists and show the international appeal of Impressionism, a phenomenon that is still with us today.
The Muscarelle Museum of Art is located on Jamestown Road on the campus of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Visit www.wm.edu/muscarelle.
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. For more information about the High, please visit www.High.org.
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