PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting a broad survey of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Drawn almost entirely from its renowned collection, this exhibition brings together more than 80 works in a variety of media—painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and pastels—to illuminate the achievements of some of history’s most beloved artists. The Impressionist’s Eye features many celebrated paintings—among them Claude Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny, Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, and Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers—offering fresh insights into these works and placing them in conversation with other major examples by these artists and their contemporaries. For example, Renoir’s ambitious Great Bathers, newly conserved on the centenary of the artist’s death, is displayed alongside treatments of the same theme by Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.
The Impressionist’s Eye includes numerous important works on paper (shown in two rotations to avoid overexposing them to light) that have not been on view in the galleries for a decade or more, emphasizing the importance that these artists attached to working in a variety of media. Among these are exquisite renderings in pen and ink by Van Gogh, sheets from Cézanne’s sketchbooks that were last exhibited at the museum in 1989, a drawing by Lautrec not seen at this museum since 1956, and one by Berthe Morisot that has been placed on view for the first time.
Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, said: “The Philadelphia Museum of Art contains one of the country’s most acclaimed collections of 19th-century art, but rarely have we had the opportunity to show our Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings so comprehensively. Assembling them in The Impressionist’s Eye enables us to convey the innovative and often boldly experimental character of the work of these artists as well as how fluidly they moved from one medium to another. The presentation of this exhibition in the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries is accompanied by a beautiful new publication devoted to the collection. It also comes as the consequence of the comprehensive renovation—the first in nearly twenty-five years—that we are undertaking this spring of the galleries in which we show our collection of later nineteenth-century European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. They are closing temporarily as we proceed with much-needed improvements in tandem with the construction of the current phase—entitled the Core Project—of our facilities master plan designed by Frank Gehry.”
The development of Impressionism began in France in the 1870s in the work of artists such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and set the stage for the bold experiments with color, line, and form that would follow over the next several decades and radically alter the course of modern painting. The exhibition includes works that were presented in several Impressionist exhibitions held in the 1870s and 1880s, as well as informal sketches and studies that could be considered more experimental or personal in nature.
The Impressionist’s Eye offers visitors new perspectives on the inventiveness and vision that the artists of this movement brought to their subjects. The choice of bold cropping and unusual points of view, the flattening of space, and the use of vibrant color and vigorous brushwork imbued their work with a bracing sense of modernity which startled contemporary audiences. Their radical way of painting also reflected a broad fascination with photography and with Japanese (Ukiyo-e) woodblock prints. Visitors can see a significant number of works by many of the key figures of Post-Impressionism such as Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, each of whom took the innovations of the Impressionists as their point of departure and then evolved in new and often dramatically different directions.
The exhibition has been organized around themes that highlight the shared interest of artists in certain subjects. Among these are Nature, The Modern City, Everyday Objects (or still life), People, and Bathers.
The introduction of commercially produced paint in tubes and the convenience of portable easels and paint sets, combined with the greater mobility afforded by the development of railroads, fostered the growing popularity of painting en plein air, or out-of-doors. The opening section of the exhibition demonstrates how firmly the artists associated with Impressionism were committed to recording their direct observations of nature and making the variability of light, color, and atmosphere a central element of their work. Among the highlights of this section are Camille Pissarro’s Railroad to Dieppe (1886), Monet’s Bend in the Epte River near Giverny (1888), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–04), as well as a lively pen-and-ink drawing executed in 1888 by Van Gogh titled Haystacks, which is remarkable for its swirling lines, bold dashes, and lively dots.
Paris provides the main inspiration for the next section of the exhibition, The Modern City. Some artists concentrated on the architecture of the French capital, capturing scenes of its grand boulevards or popular urban entertainments such as cabaret, ballet, and the theater. Artists such as Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Cassatt captured many aspects of the urban experience—the kinetic energy of great crowds traveling to and fro or a single figure caught at a moment of quiet reverie. A Woman and a Girl Driving (1881) by Cassatt, shows a modern woman—the artist’s older sister—boldly taking the reins of a horse-drawn carriage in Paris alongside the niece of Degas. Lautrec’s At the Moulin-Rouge (1889–90) captures the demi-monde at play, with a dancer kicking up her skirts as she performs the can-can amid a crowd of top-hatted men. At the Paris Opera, Degas’s The Ballet Class (1880-81) conveys the rigor of young girls learning their craft as a stage mother slumps with fatigue into a chair. Among the group of conté crayon drawings by Seurat included in the exhibition is a rendition of a woman seated on the bank of an island in the Seine, a rare study for the artist’s masterpiece, La Grande Jatte.
Another section focuses on the different ways in which artists such as Manet and Cézanne reanimated the traditional theme of still-life painting, imbuing it with a new spirit and sense of ambition, or as Cézanne put it, “I want to astonish Paris with an apple.” Flower-filled vases (Renoir), artisanal cakes (Caillebotte), or a woven basket (Manet) were convenient subjects for the artists’ experimentation. “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit and flowers,” observed Manet, who focused on this familiar genre in nearly a fifth of his canvases. In these works, visitors are invited to witness everyday objects transformed through color, texture, and line.
Many of these artists were also keen observers of people. As Van Gogh noted in 1885, “Painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine [the camera] can’t go.” His treatment of the postman Roulin’s wife clutching her baby Marcelle, created in 1888, possesses a luminous, almost otherworldly glow. In this section of the exhibition, works in clay, graphite, pastel, and paint reveal just how thoroughly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists upended longstanding traditions of rendering the human figure. Drawings such as Cézanne’s Peasant Girl Wearing a Fichu (1890-93) and such sculptures as Degas’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (modeled in wax, 1878–81, and cast in bronze, about 1922) reflect the unique qualities of different media that artists exploited to capture the character and vivacity of their subjects. Responding to the recent advent of photography, artists sought to convey the character of the sitter in ways that seem both direct and spontaneous, as demonstrated in Morisot’s Young Woman with Brown Hair (1894).
The same observations can be made of their treatment of the timeless subject of the nude, a theme that particularly fascinated Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne. Renoir’s Great Bathers (1884–87) is seen in The Impressionist’s Eye for the first time since the completion of a yearlong conservation treatment and cleaning, a project generously supported by the Bank of America Art Conservation Project. The artist labored over this canvas, seeking to establish a new direction for his work and to create an image that would be both contemporary in spirit and rival the great masters of the Renaissance. The installation enables visitors to appreciate it in a state that now more closely resembles how it looked when the artist completed it, and in the company of some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“For three years Renoir wrestled with this work,” notes Jennifer Thompson, the museum’s Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, who organized the exhibition. “Just how exhaustively, we knew from notes left by Berthe Morisot, but seeing the cross-sections and X-rays taken by our specialists in Conservation has reaffirmed precisely how much he questioned himself and started over, again and again.”
The Impressionist’s Eye, as an exhibition drawn from the collection, also offers insights into the collecting, tastes, and cultural life of Philadelphia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with Cassatt, the American in Paris who early on persuaded her family members in this city and others around the country to purchase the work of the Impressionists, touching off a new vogue in collecting. “Philadelphia was a vibrant center for collecting during this period,” Thompson notes, “and the museum’s Impressionist holdings were indelibly shaped by the taste and civic spirit of those individuals, much as today’s collectors of contemporary art enrich the cultural life of our city.”
