PARIS.- The Musée Marmottan Monet is presenting—until 10 February 2019—an exhibition entitled ‘Collections Privées: un Voyage des Impressionnistes aux Fauves’ (‘Private Collections: From the Impressionists to the Fauves’). The exhibition includes sixty-two paintings, drawings, and sculptures held in private collections (in Europe, the United States, and Latin America)—most of which have never or rarely been exhibited in Paris—in a pictorial itinerary that ranges from Monet to Matisse.

The private mansion in Rue Louis Boilly, in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, provides the ideal showcase for this event. It is worth noting that the Musée Marmottan Monet is primarily a ‘collectors’ museum’, that is to say an institution whose permanent collections—including the world’s most extensive collection of Claude Monet’s works—have been privately donated. Hence, the museum’s scientific vocation is to focus on the role played by private collectors in the arts, and its principal objective is pay tribute to them.

This is the perfect setting for the exhibition ‘Collections Privées : un Voyage des Impressionnistes aux Fauves’. Intended to follow on from ‘Impressionnistes en Privé’ (‘Impressionist Works From Private Collections’), which was held in 2014 to mark the museum’s eightieth anniversary, the exhibition presents not only Impressionist masterpieces, but also major or previously unseen works from the main pictorial and artistic movements that were active in France until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The exhibition itinerary commences with nineteen works by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Caillebotte. Landscapes executed at Bordighera, Belle-Ile, Rouen, and Varengeville, bouquets of chrysanthemums and other still lifes, elegant portraits of women, and genre scenes feature in this section, which is organised around Gustave Caillebotte’s spectacular Pont de l’Europe, the artist’s last monumental masterpiece held in a private collection. The neo-Impressionist section includes rare works by Seurat, Signac, Van Rysselberghe, and Van Gogh.

The itinerary continues with Gauguin and the École de Pont-Aven, which is brilliantly highlighted through major works by Emile Bernard, including Le Printemps (‘Spring’) and Les lutteurs (‘The wrestlers’), which are being presented for the first time in Paris. The exhibition also includes three major paintings by the emblematic Toulouse-Lautrec. In the sculpture section, Camille Claudel stands out with four works, including a previously unseen plaster entitled La petite chatelaine (‘The little chatelaine’). Also on display is a marble piece by Rodin, Tête de Saint Jean Baptiste (‘Head of John the Baptist’), and Bourdelle’s Tête d’Apollon (‘Head of Apollo’) in gilded bronze. These are followed by the Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard, and, lastly, Odilon Redon whose Le Quadrige, le char d’Apollon (Chariot of Apollo) is a major work in the exhibition. The itinerary continues with Matisse, one of whose early works, Côte sauvage, Belle-Ile-en -mer, is somewhat reminiscent of Monet’s Pyramides de Port Coton, effet de soleil (‘The Pyramids at Port-Coton, Sunlight Effect’), exhibited at the start of the exhibition itinerary. Fauve works by Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, and Van Dongen complete the exhibition, which takes visitors on a journey through time and is an ode to colour—a truly dazzling itinerary.