Nashville may be better known today as "Music City," but it has regained its earlier moniker as the "Athens of the South." It is one of only three cities in the world - San Francisco and Madrid being the others - to host a collection of Impressionist masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The exhibition, The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, is on view at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts through January 23, 2011, when the works return to Paris.
The exhibition includes 100 paintings from the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay and tells the story of the development of Impressionism through the magnificent works of artists living in Paris in the mid-to-late 19th century.
Among the highlights of the exhibition are important works, including 2 by Gustave Courbet, 6 by Edgar Degas, 15 by Édouard Manet, 6 by Claude Monet, 7 by Camille Pissarro, 11 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 5 by Alfred Sisley, 2 by Adolphe-William Bouguereau.
But the blockbuster for Americans is undoubtedly a chance to see "in the flesh" James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black,No. 1: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871), the painting best known as Whistler’s Mother.
While the majority of the works in this exhibition have been seen in Madrid and San Francisco, the exhibition boasts 17 paintings from the Musee d’Orsay’s collection that are traveling only to Nashville, including:
• The Dance Foyer at the Opera on Rue Le Peletier by Edgar Degas (1872)
• Ballet Rehearsal on the Set by Edgar Degas (1874)
• Argenteuil by Claude Monet (1875)
• Church at Vétheuil by Claude Monet (1879)
• Émile Zola by Édouard Manet (1868)
• The Woman with a White Jabot by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1880)
• William Sisley by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1864)
Also included in the exhibition:
• The Fifer by Édouard Manet (1866)
• Family Reunion by Frédéric Bazille (1867)
• Birth of Venus by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1879)
• The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte (1875)
• Racehorses before the Stands by Edgar Degas (1866–68)
• Nude with White Dog by Gustave Courbet (1861–62)
• Boy with a Cat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1868)
The Musée d’Orsay has made its works available throughout the world in several traveling exhibitions, including The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, while the museum undergoes renovation and refurbishing prior to the institution’s 25th anniversary in 2011.
“The Musée d’Orsay has the finest collection of French mid-to-late 19th-century art in the world,” said Frist Center Executive Director Susan H. Edwards, Ph.D. “In sharing these masterworks with the cities of Madrid, San Francisco and Nashville, the Musée d’Orsay offers an unparalleled cultural experience to people who might not have the opportunity to travel to Paris. Beyond including works of breathtaking attainment, the exhibition teaches about the complex intersections between academic art and the avant-garde, conveying the creative vitality of a particularly fertile moment in French intellectual and social development.”
Curated by Stéphane Guégan and Alice Thomine of the Musée d’Orsay, the exhibition broadens the conventional view of Impressionism as a radical departure from the academic and Realist art being created at the same time. The Impressionists’ approach is considered in relation to artists across the stylistic spectrum who captured the spirit of transformation sweeping Paris in the 1870s, a force that was driven by the desire for renewal after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and suppression of the Paris Commune, the impact of naturalism in literature and the expansion of the middle class and its leisure time.
Stylistically, the exhibition examines various cross-currents in painting. These include a consideration of the influence of Spanish artists such as Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez on Édouard Manet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler; the connection between the lively palettes of the Batignolles school—which included Manet, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—and the development of the classical Impressionist style and the threads linking the Realism of the Salon to the Impressionism that was pursued by artists such as Jules Breton and Jean-François Millet, whose works celebrated the beauty, luminosity and dignity of the rural landscape.
These key points are made clear to us as we go through, guided by master docent barely able to breathe because the paintings are so, well, breathtaking.
We are conducted through the exhibit by a master docent, Mancil Ezell, who tells us, "In 200 years of city, Nashville never had exhibit of this caliber."
He points out that after 30,000 years of human art, there had never been a period of time before when there were so many "isms" coinciding together, a virtual explosion of creativity and innovation in the visual arts.
It was unstoppable.
Up until this period, art was dominated by the whims of two primary funding sources: the Church (mainly the Roman Catholic Church) or the nobility, and at any one time, there would be one main style: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and so on. But in this period, an emerging middle class finally had discretionary money to buy art.
The result was that the government wanted its share of tax, Ezell says, so organized salons - displays of 2,000 paintings at a time, floor to ceiling, frame to frame. Artists had to be accepted by the bureaucrats who had specific criteria, and the top-selling artists were displayed at eye level; the less important ones above, and the newcomers down below. Artists would paint according to the specifications to be accepted and the size of the canvas would be a clue as to where they would have been placed.
The early impressionists came along, and instead of idealized or romanticized or ritualized subjects, began to paint ordinary people "captured in the act of being ordinary." Suddenly peasants, floor scrapers, wrestlers, dancers were popular subjects - but the painters, who were experimenting with new forms (not the shiny, "licked surface" of paint, but strokes that added texture and form), were being rejected as much for their technique as their subjects (like bare-chested wrestlers).
The government was losing out on revenue so decided to organize the first Impressionist Salon, in 1874, and for eight years, the Impressionists had their own Salon.
We listen enrapt to Ezell's commentary, his insights into the technique, the painters, the social mores of the time.
Finally we come upon a paintings that is iconic to Americans: Whistler's Mother (who knew it was part of the Musee D'Orsay's collection?). Apparently, Whistler's father wanted him to go to West Point. He wanted to paint, so went to Paris, instead. His parents visited him there and his mother stayed on for three years, hoping to straighten him out. In the painting, you see the influence of Japan and Velázquez and the fact that "Mother" is not centered, showing that it is not a formal portrait, but a portrait tableaux.
Ezell says that it is unlikely that "Whistler's Mother" will ever be allowed to travel again outside of France, making its presence here in Nashville all the more significant
The Impressionists had the benefit of two revolutionary developments: the introduction of the camera, and, in 1843, packaging of oil paints into disposable aluminum tubes - so they could go out in any weather and paint en plein air, and capture motion or the moment rather than paint static scenes.
Stopping in front of a Monet, he tells us that the term "impression" was first used derogatorily - as if the painters weren't skilled enough to paint a realistic sunset, they only painted an "impression" of one.
The Impressionists took the term as a compliment.
The exhibition is divided into 13 themes which allows you to best appreciate the unfolding innovations.
• The Salon of Paris examines themes of allegory and myth, classical antiquity and the links between French culture and past civilizations. Included in this section are works by William Bouguereau, Elie Delaunay, Gustave Moreau and others.
• The Allure of Nature: Millet, Courbet, and the Rise of Realism looks at the appeal of rural living and the celebration of everyday life in paintings by Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet.
• The Terrible Year: War and Civil War 1870–1871 examines the devastating effects of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the ways in which the war and France’s need for renewed national pride served as agents of cultural and artistic change; this section features paintings by Gustave Doré, Ernest Meissonier and Pierre Puvis du Chavannes.
• Naturalism in the Salon focuses on the rise of Realism in the Salon exhibitions. Everyday subjects depicted in realistic new styles appealed to a rising middle class audience with little taste for the antique.
• Manet: Between the Salon and the Avant-Garde illustrates Édouard Manet’s rejection of the overly literary and allegorical flavor of the Salon in favor of a more direct and unadorned representation of “the ordinary” in everyday life, as depicted in such works as The Fifer (1866). One of Manet’s masterpieces, Émile Zola (1868), confirms the links between Realism and the naturalistic literature of the period, while showing a wide range of influences, including Spanish and Japanese art.
• The Portrait Tableau features the motif of a figure in an interior unified through harmonious orchestrations of form, value, color and space. A manifestation of the “art for art’s sake” concept, this is exemplified in by James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871).
• Manet and The Batignolles School illustrates how Édouard Manet’s pioneering artistic achievements made him a leader of the emerging avant-garde that congregated in Paris’s Batignolles neighborhood to formulate the ideas that would eventually lead to Impressionism. In this gallery are works by Henri Fantin-Latour, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and other artists active in the 1860s.
• Degas and Caillebotte: Images of Modern Life features the aesthetic realism of Edgar Degas and Gustave Caillebotte, who balanced an interest in light and color with a desire to portray everyday life through carefully planned compositions and finely controlled drawing. Highlights of this gallery are two of Degas’s ballet paintings and Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875).
• Artists Painting Artists features works in which artists of the avant-garde such as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet painted each other’s portraits, providing fascinating insight into their personal relationships.
• Toward the Impressionist Landscape reveals the influence of plein air painters Eugene Boudin and Johann Jongkind on Édouard Monet’s early development in the 1860s.
• Classic Impressionism is the largest section of the exhibition, containing masterpieces of landscape painting created throughout the 1870s by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot.
• Pissarro and Cézanne explores the friendship and shared influences shaping the works of two of the earliest Impressionists, who painted similar subjects, often employing patterns of regularly applied brushstrokes, close tonalities and the frequent simplification of planes to define volume, weight, and space. Eventually, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne would both depart from classic Impressionism— Pissarro to the pointillist technique of the younger artist Georges Seurat and Cézanne to an ever more geometric faceting.
• Manet: Impressionism and Beyond brings the exhibition full circle, showing that Édouard Manet not only influenced the Impressionists, but was in turn influenced by them to paint out of doors, lighten his palette, and explore increasingly gestural brushwork. These innovations appear in the artist’s luminousOn the Beach (1873) and the modern history painting The Escape of Rochefort (ca. 1881).
Tickets on Sale
Advance timed tickets for The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay are available through www.fristcenter.org (additional charges apply) and on site at the Frist Center.
Admission prices for this specially ticketed exhibition: Visitors 18 and younger FREE; Adults $15; Seniors (65+), $12; Active duty military $12; College students with ID $12 (Thurs., Fri. evenings, 5-9 pm., $5); Frist Center Members free.
Now in its 10th year, the Frist Center is fascinating because it does not have its own permanent collection; rather, it obtains special shows. Out of more than 7,000 museums, only about 700 are accredited; the Frist won its accreditation by the American Association of Museums in its seventh year.
The Frist Center is open seven days a week: Mondays through Wednesdays, and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. and Sundays, 1–5:30 p.m., with the Frist Center Café opening at noon.
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 919 Broadway, Nashville, Tenn., 615- 244-3340, www.fristcenter.org.
A number of special hotel packages are available during the run of the exhibition; information is at www.fristcenter.org and from Nashville's Convention & Visitors Bureau, www.visitmusiccity.com, 800-657-6910.
--Karen Rubin, National Eclectic Travel Examiner
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