HOUSTON, TEXAS.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents "Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow," on view December 15, 2002 - March 9, 2003 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building. This magnificent exhibition brings together 76 notable French paintings from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, one of the world’s great art museums. Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow includes some of the Moscow museum´s most important holdings. Never before has an American exhibition been drawn exclusively from the Pushkin, and 53 of the paintings have never been exhibited in the United States.

 

The exhibition begins with Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, progresses through the 18th century with works by François Boucher, Jacques-Louis David, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and through the 19th century with paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet. The exhibition continues with luminous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. Concluding the presentation are daring early Modern works by Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

 

The exhibition also sheds light on the story of the Russian taste for French art. Many of the paintings were originally owned by Catherine the Great, as well as notable collectors from Russian nobility and early 20th-century merchant-patrons. Works from these distinguished collections were united at the Pushkin to form one of the most impressive arrays of French paintings outside of France.

 

The exhibition is organized by the MFAH. Following its Houston premiere, it travels to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (April 5—June 29, 2003) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (July 27—October 13, 2003).