June 1, 1990
Five important Monet landscapes from The Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection of European paintings will serve as the focal point of an exhibition of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings and works on paper. Entitled Monet and His Contemporaries, it will open in the Lobby Gallery of The Brooklyn Museum on September 14 where it will remain on view through June 3, 1991. The exhibition, the latest in the Curator’s Choice series, is made possible by a generous grant from The Florence Gould Foundation.
Among the five Monet paintings in the exhibition are The Cliff at Pourville, one of a Normandy coast series done in 1883 and The Doge’s Palace in Venice, painted during Monet’s only visit to Venice in 1908. The other three Monets are The Church at Vernon (1894), Island of Port-Villez (1897), and the well known Houses of Parliament (1903), one of the finest in a series done in London.
Among the Monet contemporaries whose work is included in the exhibition are fellow Impressionist landscape painters Pissarro and Renoir; older colleague and predecessor in plein air landscape painting Daubigny; and Cézanne, who built the structural vision evidenced in his View of Gardanne from Impressionist beginnings. Also included will be Bonnard’s apartment-eye view of a Paris street scene, Les Boutiques, Boulevard de Batignolles (an important long-term loan from the Alex Hillman Family Foundation), which builds upon the earlier work of Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir; and Matisse’s Nude in a Wood (1905), a major innovation in pure color painting.
Also represented will be works by artists who, unlike Monet, are primarily figure painters. They include Degas’s large oil study of a bather, an early Berthe Morisot portrait of a mother and daughter, and three works by Toulouse-Lautrec. Other important works are Cypresses, a sepia-ink drawing by Van Gogh; Picasso’s Standing Nude (1906); and Pissarro’s gouache study for a fan, The Turkey Girl.
The exhibition has been selected by Sarah Faunce, Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, from the collections of both the Departments of Painting and Sculpture and Prints and Drawings.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 07-09/1990, 117-118. View Original
