NASHVILLE, TENN.- The Frist Art Museum presents The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art, an exhibition that tells the enthralling story of Impressionism from its origins in 1874 to its legacy in the early 20th century through paintings and sculptures by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Vincent van Gogh, and many others. Organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, the exhibition is on view in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries from February 26 through May 31, 2026.

Through nearly 50 paintings and sculptures, The Impressionist Revolution reveals the rebellious origins of the independent artist collective known as the Impressionists and the revolutionary course they charted for modern art. Breaking with tradition in both how and what they painted, the Impressionists redefined what constituted cutting-edge contemporary art. The unique innovations of its core members, including Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, set the foundation for generations of avant-garde artists that followed, from Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse.

Coming shortly after the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 in Paris, The Impressionist Revolution invites visitors to reconsider these now-beloved artists—once thought to be scandalous renegades—as well as the impact they had on 20th-century art. In the exhibition catalogue, Dr. Nicole Myers, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Chief Curatorial and Research Officer and the Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art, writes, “Although today we use the term Impressionist to loosely describe the aesthetic of short, staccato strokes of bright pigments applied rapidly, Impressionism as it emerged in the 1870s wasn’t a single, unified style. Rather, it reflected a shared desire among a small group of avant-garde artists to capture their experience of contemporary life through subject and style.”

Under the name of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc., the Impressionists organized a total of eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. The artwork in their shows featured everyday scenes of life in and around Paris—carriages and pedestrians, gardens and pastoral scenes, views of coastal ports and waterways, and still lifes in domestic spaces. “The Impressionists’ insistence on depicting modern subjects in an equally modern style and displaying their works on their own terms was nothing short of a revolution,” notes Myers.

The name Impressionism was first intended as an insult by the French critic Louis Leroy in response to Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) and was only begrudgingly accepted by the artists later. The primary criticism directed at Impressionist painters was their perceived inability to create a finished picture and that the works were merely rough sketches.

Organized thematically, the exhibition begins with the section titled “Rebels with a Cause,” which examines the seeds of the revolutionary movement through works by Renoir, Monet, and others. The artist collective planned their own group shows and bypassed the official Salon organized by the state-run Academy of Fine Arts, an act that was both rebellious and entrepreneurial. While the Academy favored traditional styles and historical subjects, the Impressionists created art from common scenes from the street and home. Yet, except for a few progressive critics and collectors, there was little appreciation or market for the artwork until well after the last show in 1886.

Nearly all the Impressionists worked outdoors and sought to depict light and movement, whether in and around Paris or in France’s southern regions and along its coasts. The section “Field Notes” contains landscapes by Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and others. “They experimented with cutting-edge color theories, such as painting contrasting complementary colors side by side to boost each color’s vibrancy, and they avoided black and gray in their depiction of shadows and volume,” writes Myers.

The following section “Weird Science” focuses on the influence of Georges Seurat and the shocking new style called Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism he introduced in 1886 with his painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. “Whereas the Impressionists explored color and optical theories intuitively, Seurat transformed them into a science,” says Myers. Instead of mixing colors on a palette, Seurat and others, including Paul Signac and Pissarro, placed individual points of brilliant complementary colors side by side so they would intensify one another and create a shimmering effect for the viewer. Myers notes that “their shared aim was to create a truer representation of how we optically experience light and, in the process, restore the compositional stability that many felt had been abandoned by the Impressionists’ emphasis on spontaneity.”

A reaction to Pointillism was led by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre Bonnard, who forged new styles that prioritized emotions, ideas, and personal expression over purely optical impressions. The section “Side Effects” examines the work of these artists now referred to as Post-Impressionists and the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophets”), who experimented with antinaturalistic colors, exaggerated forms, and symbolic subjects.

The final section, “Ever After,” covers how the radical aesthetics and groundbreaking subjects launched by the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists who followed set the trajectory for the development of contemporary art in the 20th century. “Almost every stylistic breakthrough from this period—Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Abstraction—had its roots in the Impressionists’ subversion of traditional Academic values, from the subject depicted to the finish of the brightly colored surface,” writes Myers. Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch, and others demonstrate how artists grappled with the legacy of Impressionism in the continuation of modern art.

There are two interactive stations in the gallery, one devoted to the principles of color theory with an activity based on Pissarro’s Apple Harvest and another to historical and art historical events on a touchscreen timeline.