Columbia, S.C. – An exhibition of well known and much beloved French artists will be coming to the Columbia Museum of Art starting on Saturday, October 5. French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850 – 1950, organized by the Brooklyn Museum. The show will last through January 5, 2025. It is traveling most recently from the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and showcases more than 50 remarkable works from the Brooklyn Museum’s distinguished collection. Earlier this comprehensive show traveled abroad to Korea and Italy. The exhibition encompasses the key avant-garde movements that emerged in and around Paris during this 100 year period. In France, the years between the Revolution of 1848 to the end of World War II were characterized by sweeping social, intellectual, and political change. The Western art world, centered in Paris, also witnessed remarkable transformations as artists experimented with bold, expressive styles that revitalized traditional genres.
French Moderns features remarkable examples of Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism by the era’s leading artists, including Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and more. Among the most impressive works are Degas’ third largest canvas and a stunning landscape by Camille Pissarro.
The exhibition is organized thematically in four sections: Landscape, Still Life, Portraits and Models, and The Nude. Beginning with the landscapes of artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the birth of plein-air painting, it surveys the innovative styles and techniques developed by artists working in France, spanning 19th- and early 20th-century movements from the Realism of Gustave Courbet to the Surrealism of Yves Tanguy.
There are a number of programs and evemts planned. On Tuesday, October 22 there will be a music performance inspired by the exhibition featuring French composers who spanned the same period— galleries and bar open at 5:00 pm and a concert from 6:00 – 7:30 pm, This special presentation features tenor Dominic Armstrong, cellist Claire Bryant, pianist Phillip Bush, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, pianist Lynn Kompass, and flutist Jennifer Parker-Harley. $28 / $18 for members.
A lecture will be given on Sunday, October 27th from 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. by Lisa Small, who is a senior curator of European art with the Brooklyn Museum and one of the organizers of this exhibit. Since 2011 she has curated and co-curated a number of traveling shows covering a wide variety of periods. During this lecture, she will discuss the transformations in subject, style, and patronage that defined the key modern art movements emerging in and around 19th- and early 20th-century Paris. This lecture is free with membership or admission.
Michael Neumeister, the Senior Curator at the Columbia Museum of Art, described this exhibition as “spectacular.” “It is rare for works with this degree of importance and quality to travel outside of major institutions,” he said. “This presents a wonderful opportunity for our community to experience significant works of art by some of the most familiar and important names in art history.” He mentioned that one of the Monet’s to be shown is from his well known Houses of Parliament oil painting series, with a lovely view of the Thames River. He also mentioned that Matisse’s Flowers (1906) will be shown. This modernist still life was famously included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art — known as the Armory Show — in New York, the first major exhibition of modern European art in the U.S. There will be a ballet dancer by Degas, a rare sculpture in addition to two of his paintings, as well as a sculpted head of Balzac by Rodin.
A handful of artists of this period – but only one or two works of their art — can be seen scattered around North Carolina. At the Biltmore House in Asheville, one can find “Young Algerian Girl” and “Child with an Orange,” both by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Claude Monet has a characteristic style of brush stroke, which can be seen in two landscape paintings also at the Biltmore House. The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has a few Monets, such as the Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists. In fact the Columbia Museum itself houses permanently another version of The Seine at Giverny (L’Ile aux Orties, Giverny) which was a gift to the Museum by Mary T. Chambers.
The CMA is located in the heart of downtown Columbia, S.C. It is now considered a leading art institution in the United States. The museum is opened daily from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.—Thursday until 8:00 p.m. but closed on Mondays. Admission is $15. There is no special fee to see this outstanding touring exhibition: French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850 – 1950. For more information go to: www.colmbiamuseum.org.