OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA.- The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is hosting “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas: The Mellon Collection of French Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” June 22 through Sept. 22, 2019. “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” includes more than 70 works by European masters such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau and Vincent Van Gogh.

Featuring more than 70 works by French and European masters such as Degas, Manet, Monet, Rousseau and Van Gogh, this exhibition celebrates Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon’s extraordinary gift of 19th and early 20th century French art to the VMFA. After first becoming interested in British sporting art, Paul Mellon began to collect 19th-century French art in the 1940s with his second wife, Rachel Lambert Mellon. While their collection largely consists of Impressionist paintings, it also includes masterpieces from every important school of French art—from Romanticism and the Barbizon School through Cubism and the School of Paris. Taken together, these works exemplify the Mellons’ personal vision and highly original collecting strategies, which provide a context for understanding this unique collection.

The exhibition reproduces the invigorating experience of the Mellons’ collection, in which each work resonates with and gains greater strength from its lovingly created context. “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” is presented in a series of sections including Cyphers of Modernity, Horses, Flowers, Views of Paris, People, Water, Interiors and Tables, The French Countryside, The Transformation of the Ordinary and VMFA: Toward Impressionism. Opening with Cyphers of Modernity, visitors will be introduced to two of the collection’s most characteristic paintings: Berthe Morisot’s “Young Woman Watering a Shrub” and Théodore Géricault’s “Mounted Jockey.” These paintings are emblematic of the collection in their commitment to modernism, as well as their subject matter, which appealed to Mrs. Mellon’s love of gardening and Mr. Mellon’s passion for horses and horse racing.

Exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.