Monet to Matisse: French Moderns
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR - To Sep 15
Monet to Matisse: French Moderns hits that sweet spot in French art that stretches from Impressionism to Modernism and continues to generate world interest, appearing in everything from dorm-room posters to blockbuster exhibitions. The 60-piece show draws on the Brooklyn Museum’s European collection and has already traveled globally to places like Jeju, South Korea, and Padua, Italy. It includes paintings such as Eugène Louis Boudin’s Beach at Trouville, Jules Breton’s End of the Working Day and The Wave, by Gustave Courbet, plus Auguste Rodin’s sculptures The Age of Bronze and a cast of Balzac in a Monk’s Habit.
Lloyd DeWitt, the new Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930 at the Portland Art Museum, told Preview that viewers should look for a painting by Claude Monet of Britain’s Houses of Parliament on a foggy day, part of a series Monet did while in exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War. Monet’s idea was to paint the same building at different times and in varying conditions, capturing an impression rather than a detailed image.
“It was a quasi-scientific way of examining the same subject to show that nothing’s permanent … and this is a lot about perception,” says DeWitt. Such Impressionism became iconic because the paintings grab the viewer, he says. “There’s a truth and honesty there, and they captured this by painting on the spot,” he says of the Impressionists in general.
DeWitt also says viewers should look for Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Carpet Merchant of Cairo, a neo-classical work from 1869, when Impressionism was already quite advanced. The slick painting style gives an ethnographic view of a marketplace in Cairo. DeWitt also singles out Berthe Morisot, a female Impressionist who painted female subjects in a non-idealized manner, as seen in Madame Boursier and Her Daughter.
On view in the next room is the 14-piece show Pisarro to Picasso, which tracks a similar timeline and includes such stunning works as View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica (1887), by Martin Johnson Heade. On loan from the Kirkland Family Collection, the show also features Marc Chagall’s Betrothed (1905) and two still lifes by Pablo Picasso that span the life of Cubism. There’s more Monet, in the form of his masterpiece Banks of the Seine River near Vétheuil, and rare landscapes by Henri Matisse and Georgia O’Keeffe. Catch these shows in early September while you can.
Meet the curator Q&A Sep 13, 1–2pm
