DALLAS, TX.- The Dallas Museum of Art announced the publication of a volume of essays dedicated to the Museum’s ongoing lecture series focused on European art, The Richard R. Brettell Lecture Series. Inspired by a series of public lectures given at the Dallas Museum of Art between 2009 and 2013, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art comprises twelve illustrated essays from leading academics and museum specialists. The book offers a series of intimate case studies in the history of 19th-century European art.

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art is edited by Dr. Heather MacDonald, the DMA’s Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art, with contributions by scholars Richard R. Brettell, André Dombrowski, Stephen F. Eisenman, Paul Galvez, John House, Richard Kendall, Dorothy Kosinski, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Nancy Locke, Belinda Thomson, Richard Thomson, and Paul Hayes Tucker. The color illustrated 175-page book is published by the Dallas Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press. (Publication date: October 12, 2013; Price: $24.95; ISBN: 978-0-300-18757-1).

“The twelve essays featured in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art serve as a scholarly tribute to the most important realist, impressionist, and post-impressionist works in the Museum’s collection,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “As we mark the twentieth anniversary of the Richard R. Brettell Lecture Series, it’s exciting to anticipate future decades of research, scholarship, and publications devoted to our evolving collections.”

This volume opens with a new reading of one of Gustave Courbet’s great hunting scenes, The Fox in the Snow, and ends with an exploration of a group of interior scenes by Édouard Vuillard. Each essay stands alone as a richly contextualized reading of a single work or group of works by one artist.

“Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art highlights not only a group of remarkable works of art but also a diverse range of scholarly voices reflecting the current conversations about impressionist, post-impressionist, and other 19th-century European art that are taking place in universities and museums around the world,” said MacDonald.

The DMA will celebrate the publication of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art at a public event on Saturday, October 12, that will include two brief lectures by distinguished alumni of the Dallas Museum of Art followed by a panel discussion on the collection of European art at the DMA.

Dr. Brettell, Dallas Morning News art critic and the Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair of Art and Aesthetics in the School of Arts and Humanities and the co-director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Museums at the University of Texas at Dallas, will discuss Max Liebermann’s Swimmers. A presentation on Léon Frédéric’s Nature or Abundance by Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, Director of The Phillips Collection and former DMA Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will follow.

Drs. Brettell and Kosinski will then be joined on stage by Dr. Maxwell L. Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director, and Olivier Meslay, The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, for a conversation about the process of building the DMA’s collection of European art from the 1980s to the present and prospects for the future growth of the collection. For more information and for tickets, visit the Museum’s website, DMA.org.

The Richard R. Brettell Lecture Series brings notable scholars of 19th- and 20th-century European art to present new research and fresh interpretations of the Dallas Museum of Art’s modern masterworks. The series was created with a gift from Carolyn and Roger Horchow in honor of Dr. Richard Brettell, former DMA Director and eminent scholar of 19th-century French art. Dr. Brettell inaugurated the lecture series in 1993 with a talk on the artist Paul Gauguin.

The collection of European art at the DMA encompasses a distinguished group of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, with strengths in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Highlights of the collection include works by Claude-Joseph Vernet, Eugène Delacroix, and Vincent van Gogh.

In recent years, the Museum has acquired important 18th- ,19th-,and early 20th-century works by Gustave Caillebotte, Théodore Chassériau, Camille Corot, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Guillaume Guillon Lethière, and Paul Signac. These works have joined outstanding holdings of 18th- and 19th-century painting and sculpture by artists such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Anne Vallayer-Coster, and Édouard Vuillard.

Impressionist and post-impressionist paintings in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection include important works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh.

At the heart of the Museum’s modern European collection is a world-renowned group of paintings by Piet Mondrian, as well as works by Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso; a still-life by Henri Matisse; and surrealist canvases by Yves Tanguy and René Magritte.

A specialist in French painting of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, Heather MacDonald joined the DMA in 2005 and has collaborated on the organization of numerous exhibitions of old master, impressionist, and modernist art. Prior to her arrival at the DMA, Dr. MacDonald worked at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden in San Marino, California. She earned her doctorate and Master of Arts in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation on landscape and political culture in the paintings of the 18th-century French artist Claude-Joseph Vernet.