International Art News

From September 19 2012 to January 6, 2013 – Musee du Luxembourg
On 29 January 1906, a group of art collectors and artists formed the Modern Art Club (Cercle de l’Art moderne) in Le Havre. Among the members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Emile Othon Friesz and some of the town’s biggest collectors at the beginning of the 20th century: Olivier Senn, Charles-Auguste Marande, Pieter van der Velde, Georges Dussueil, Oscar Schmitz, Edouard Lüthy…They set themselves the objective of promoting modern art in Le Havre.

Between 1906 and 1910, the group organised exhibitions, lecture series, poetry readings and concerts. Frantz Jourdain, Guillaume Apollinaire and Claude Debussy supported the club, which was linked from the outset to the newly established Salon d’Automne.
On its initiative, works by the great artists of the time were shown in Le Havre, especially at four annual exhibitions: the “old” Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, and the Neo-Impressionists, but above all the young Fauves, brought by their friends Braque, Dufy, and Friesz. Le Havre, which was not too far from Paris, gave the Fauves a warm welcome and a potential outlet for their recent production, the very works that had sparked the scandal of the “wild beasts’ cage.”

Who were these men? What did they have in common? What was it about the historical, economic and cultural context of Le Havre that favoured the emergence of the club?

Le Havre was an industrial town, founded relatively recently (1517); by the mid 19th century, its flourishing port had become a major gateway for imports of exotic products. Local businessmen and notables were keen to give the city a “soul”. Consequently, a museum was established near the waterfront in 1845 and well-known artists were invited to regular exhibitions organised by the Art Friends Club (in 1868 Manet won a prize for his Dead Bullfighter, which had been refused five years before at the Salon de Paris). The merchants interested in these activities took an active part in the cultural life of the town and the success of their businesses had a direct influence on the fate of the artists, hence Eugène Boudin’s pithy comment: “No cotton, no paintings”.

In the late 19th century, a new generations of collectors appeared. They were all members of the Art Friends Club (Société des Amis des Arts), but had a particular interest in the work of young artists and often went to Paris to see the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, the galleries run by Druet, Bernheim and Vollard, artists’ studios and auction rooms. They joined Dufy, Friesz and Braque in this singular adventure.
The collections of two of them, Olivier Senn and Charles-Auguste Marande, are now in the Musée d’Art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre, donated by the artists themselves or by their descendants. The collections of van der Velde, Dussueil, Schmitz, Lüthy and others, although scattered, are well known.

Each one tells us something of the collector’s personality. Although there are some similarities due to shared tastes (for Boudin, Pissarro, Marquet…), the collections reveal individual quirks and daring choices. For instance, Senn started his collection with two major works by Delacroix and Courbet from the 1850s and went on to collect Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces, while Dussueil and van der Velde were immediately attracted by the very latest work, buying Matisses at the same time as the Steins, and before the Morozovs and Shchukin. Degas and Cross are well represented in the Senn collection, while Van Dongen was preferred by van der Velde or Dussueil. There was obviously complicity and emulation between them and paintings circulated and sometimes changed hands.

The exhibition presents some 90 works and takes visitors into the collectors’ world. Going beyond their private interests, they joined the club to defend a conception of their commitment to modern art and artists, and to the public interest. The show also looks at the personal careers of the artists linked to the club, at first united in the defence of Fauvism and then gradually going their separate ways. The Cercle de l’Art moderne can be seen as a unique and short-lived provincial phenomenon, an instant of grace due to a handful of people convinced of the need to defend modernity. Its avant-garde image stuck to the town and region in which it developed.

Musee du Luxembourg

Edgar Degas | Danseuse assise, penchée en avant, elle se masse le pied gauche (Dancer sitting, leaning forward, she massages her left foot) 1881–83 | Caillebotte legacy in Luxembourg, 1894 | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © Hervé Lewandowski | © RMN (RF22712)/Musée d’Orsay

Until June 24, 2012 – Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
‘Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers 1850 — 1918 | Drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Eugène Boudin | France 1824–98 | La Dame en bleu (Woman in blue)1860–70 | Beige paper, pencil, watercolour | Bequest of Carle Dreyfus, 1953 | RF 29980, Recto | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Jean Schormans

It celebrates the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque as depicted by leading artists of the time such as Edgar Degas, Pierre—Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot and Jean François Millet. These artists increasingly abandoned idealised representations of the female figure, and turned to women from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, depicting them in their family lives and domestic activities, as well as in the public realm as spectators, performers and workers. Through these fascinating drawings, we see French society undergoing radical transformation.

Gallery Hours

Edgar Degas - Woman in a Tub, c. 1883 - Pastell auf Papier - Tate: Bequeathed by Mrs. A.F. Kessler 1983 © Tate, London 2011

From February 10, 2012 to  May 13, 2012 – Albertina
Masterworks on Paper is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the significance of drawing to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist avant-garde movements—and to the development of modern art.
The Albertina, Vienna, Austria  – The exhibition will present up to 200 drawings, watercolours and pastels by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Active in France during the second half of the nineteenth century and closely associated with avant-garde movements, artists such as Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec created works on paper that may be less well known than their paintings but which are just as significant. This is the first international exhibition devoted exclusively to drawings by these artists and will considerably extend knowledge of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The starting point for Impressionism on Paper is the fact that a large proportion (40%) of all the items shown in the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 were works on paper. Many of these can be identified and are included on the selection list. To this core will be added numerous other examples by these artists and others that will provide an overview of their drawing skills at this critical stage in the development of a widely appreciated moment in the development of French art.

The aim is to demonstrate the different types of drawing pursued by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and to demonstrate the various purposes to which their works on paper were put.

Claude Monet Waterloo Bridge, London, 1901 Pastel Collection Triton Fondation, The Netherlands

Drawing is not an activity with which the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have so far been closely associated. The exhibition, however, will illustrate unequivocally and for the first time that for these artists drawing was a primary function and not a secondary activity.   Although drawings were used as part of the preparatory process towards a painting, more and more they came to be regarded by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as finished works of art in their own right. Many of the pastels by Degas, the watercolours by Cézanne, the pen and ink drawings by Van Gogh or the works in mixed media by Toulouse-Lautrec were made on a large scale specifically for exhibition.

Impressionism on Paper, therefore, will show that far from ignoring the art of drawing the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists chose to emphasize its primacy thereby ceasing to uphold or even recognize the traditional distinction between drawing and painting. Instead, they elevated the status of drawing to the level of painting itself regarding both practices as part of a single aesthetic.

Pierre-August Renoir - Nude Bathers Playing with a Crab, c. 1897-1900 - Pastell auf Papier - Sammlung Jean Bonna, Genf

The result was that the traditional hierarchy separating painting from drawing established during the Renaissance ceased with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This, in turn, had considerable consequences for the development of modern art in so far as the fusion of line and colour resulting from a series of multiple gestural acts, which characterizes the best examples of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist drawings, paved the way for such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Bridget Riley.

Museum Hours

FROM 4 JUNE TO 26 SEPTEMBER 2010 – Musee des Beaux Arts de Rouen
The Normandie impressionniste festival, from June to September 2010, pays tribute to Impressionism throughout the territory of Higher and Lower Normandy. This multi-disciplinary event (encompassing painting, music, cinema and literature), at a scale rarely seen in France, is a perfect opportunity to discover the exceptional heritage and all the creativity that lies in Normandy, the native region of the movement. It is in this context that the musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, which houses the largest Impressionist collection aside Paris, presents some one hundred masterpieces by the greatest masters, dedicated to the town with «one hundred church bells».

Paintings from the world over
This nationally important exhibition which is to be the major event of the festival brings together a group of exceptional works of art from private and public collections from all over the world, among them various master pieces never shown before in France. Over one hundred and thirty paintings by great painters from the end of the XIXth century, led by Monet, Gauguin and Pissarro, will allow the visitors to explore one of the last great themes in the history of Impressionism that has not yet been the focus of an exhibition, the role the Normand capital played in this pictorial revolution. The works are presented in a mostly chronological order. But at certain moments in the exhibition some iconographic themes are isolated in order to show the persistence of motifs now classical, found over various decades.

Monet and his Cathedrals
The exhibition covers a very large perspective, from the forerunners of Impressionism such as Turner to the representatives of the School of Rouen like Albert Lebourg, and sheds light on unknown artists such as Charles Fréchon, Robert-Antoine Pinchon or George Morren. But it grants special attention to three masters. Claude Monet is the one who seems the most intimately linked to the town. During his first stays, in 1872-73, Rouen is above all a port in which large trading ships anchored. The paintings he produced at the time show a little-known aspect of his «aquatic» research, just before Impression, soleil levant. He came back to Rouen in the spring of 1892 to create his first series of Cathedrals, and the second on the following spring. This mythical ensemble, one of the greatest revolutions in the history of art, would be finished in his workshop, and dated 1894. The exhibition presents eleven of those paintings, an unexpec ted blessing in 2010 when masterpieces constantly on demand travel ever so much less.

Pissarro on the other hand began in Rouen an extraordinary story of hotel rooms from which he painted, from 1883 to 1898, the founding masterpieces of the modern urban landscape. But in 1883 Pissarro still worked very often outdoors where his points of view were on either side of the Seine. His first vision of Rouen still includes peaceful embankments, even though the urban excitement seen from above interested him as can be seen in the masterpiece of the Courtauld Institute in London, La Place Lafayette. It is greatly due to Pissarro’s Influence that young Paul Gauguin, who wished to leave Paris, also settled in Rouen in 1884, where he stayed for ten months. His ill-known production there poses essential questions on Impressionism in the middle of the 1880s. The originality of these paintings also lies in the fact he stationed himself in his residential district, ignoring the downtown area and very rarely painted the Seine. Gauguin’s Ro uen is a green and mysterious village, with a very particular relief that suggests vertical and closed visions, in which the spectator has the impression of burying himself.
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