LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, premiers an exhibition of 100 extraordinary artworks from one of the world’s finest private collections of French drawings from November 7, 2004 through January 17, 2005. Passion for Drawing: Poussin to Cézanne, Works from the Prat Collection explores three centuries (1615–1900) of French drawing beginning with the late mannerist style and continuing through the triumph of Impressionism. The collection has been painstakingly assembled by Louis-Antoine and Véronique Prat of Paris. Works by Poussin, Lorrain, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and Seurat were selected by Pierre Rosenberg, honorary president-director of the Louvre and guest curator for this project.

A panorama of French drawing presents the continuity and vitality of the French school— landscapes, portraits, as well as mythological, literary, and biblical subjects— executed in a variety of media, including red and black chalk, graphite, and pen and ink. Eighteenth-century sketches, known as pensées or “first thoughts” are featured along with celebrated drawings, such as Nicolas Poussin’s masterpiece of the 1640s, The Abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, and Magdalene in the Desert by Claude Lorrain.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins by illustrating various trends of the 17th-century: the heirs of mannerism such as Jacques Callot, who combined beauty and ugliness in his depiction of soldiers and gnomes; and the French artists who made the pilgrimage to Rome, including Poussin and Lorrain. French classicism of the Louis XIV era is illustrated by four masterpieces of the king’s official court painter, Charles Le Brun. Both the major and minor masters of the 18th-century are represented—the finest of Antoine Watteau’s Savoyards series; three accomplished works by François Boucher; and beautiful wash drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

The pinnacle of the neoclassical style is seen in three superb drawings by Jacques-Louis David, important studies by Jean-François-Pierre Peyron, and monumental drawings by Charles Meynier and Guillon Lethière. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (with four masterly studies on blue paper), Antoine-Jean Gros (final study for The Plague Victims in Jaffa), and Anne-Louis Girodet’s depiction of an Arab soldier mark the route toward romanticism, followed by four beautiful drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugene Delacroix’s L’Amoureuse au Piano, a symbolic image from romantic poetry. The exhibition ends with a drawing by Cézanne, sometimes called the late classicist for developing his own reality “by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone” on the eve of a century that was to see volume and form explode and disappear with the birth of Cubism.

Viewed together, these drawings constitute an evocative representation of the evolution of French art between 1615 and 1900, with a special emphasis on the human figure as it was depicted by the seminal artists of the French school.

The Prat Collection - The Prat Collection was begun by Louis-Antoine and Véronique Prat in 1974. The Prats set out to build a collection that highlighted the work of French artists active before 1900—drawings by great masters as well as superb examples by less well-known artists. It provides one of the most in-depth explorations of the art of French draftsmanship in the world. Portions of the collection were exhibited in 1990–91 in New York, Fort Worth, and Ottawa, with subsequent exhibitions held at the Louvre, the National Gallery of Scotland, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Substantial additions were made to the collection since the aforementioned exhibitions; and many of the works selected for this LACMA exhibition have never been displayed previously.