: Masterpieces from one of the world's finest collections of French
art will be on view July 27 through October 13 at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art.
The exhibition, "Old Masters, Impressionists and Moderns: French
Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow," encompasses
76 works surveying 250 years of French painting, and includes
many works never seen in Los Angeles. Featured artists include
Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jacques-Louis David, Paul
Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude
Monet and Pablo Picasso, among others.
LACMA is the only West Coast venue for this exhibition, which was
organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The exhibition opens with Old Master paintings from the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Included in this gallery
are Nicolas Poussin's "Rinaldo and Armida" circa 1630, and Claude
Lorain's "The Abduction of Europa," 1655. Poussin's work
exemplified the skillful rendering, balanced composition and
elevated subject matter that made him an undisputed master of
classical painting. Lorrain's painting is a mythological
landscape imbued with the serene light for which he is famous.
Eighteenth Century works in the exhibition - among them defining
works by Francois Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire, chart the
rise of the French Rococo style.
By the late Eighteenth Century, Jacques-Louis David reigned as
leader of the neoclassical style. The exhibition presents
"Andromache Mourning Hector," 1783, a painting the typified
David's classical approach to both subject matter and
composition. One of David's greatest students,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, is represented by an exceptional
work painted for the future czar of Russia, Alexander II. In
"Virgin with Chalice," 1841, Ingres places Mary between Saints
Nikolai and Alexander Nevsky, the patron saints of Czar Nicholas
I and the crown prince.
The exhibition then presents Nineteenth Century landscape
paintings with several works by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot,
Gustav Courbet and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña.
The State Pushkin Museum is especially strong in French painting
of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. The
exhibition presents paintings by Monet including paintings from
his mature period, none of which have previously been seen in the
United States. Among the other classic Impressionist masterpieces
are Renoir's "In the Garden," 1876, Degas' "Dancer Posing for a
Photographer," 1875, and Pissarro's "L'Avenue de l' Opéra, Snow,
Morning," 1898. The exhibition will also present works by Charles
Francois Daubigny, Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec.
Works like van Gogh's rarely seen "The Prison Courtyard," 1890,
three canvases from Gauguin's Tahiti period and several paintings
by Cézanne will be presented.
The Twentieth Century is represented by works from two
outstanding collections formed before the Russian Revolution by
Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. Among the
paintings in Morozov's collection are Pierre Bonnard's "Summer in
Normandy," 1912, and Henri-Charles Manguin's Fauve masterpiece
"Bathing Woman," 1906. From the Shchukin collection are several
canvases by Picasso, including "Harlequin and His Companion (The
Saltimbanques)," 1901, the rose period canvas "Spanish Woman from
Mallorca," 1905 and the Cubist work "The Violin," 1912.
The show will conclude with several brilliantly colored paintings
by Matisse, including "Goldfish," 1912, and "Nasturtiums and The
Dance," 1912, and Henri Rousseau's "Jaguar Attacking a Horse,"
1910.
For information, 323-857-6000 or visit www.lacma.org.
