Impressionism and Beyond: Making Art Modern in France, 1850-1950

Join curator Lisa Small for a lecture celebrating the opening of French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degas.

Today, many people see a world of beauty in landscapes by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. Or they enjoy a glimpse into the private and public daily lives of the varied people depicted by Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, all captured in animated brushwork and rich colors. But this was not always the case. In this talk, Lisa Small takes us back to nineteenth-century Paris to survey the emergence of the successive avant-garde movements that shocked and dismayed the art world. These revolutions — from the grounded Realism of Gustave Courbet to the vivid Fauvism of Henri Matisse — were centered in France, but artists from other countries who came there to study and work also contributed to these dynamic artistic changes. Focusing primarily on works from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned collection of modern European art, we will witness the broad shift from naturalism to abstraction, trace the waning influence of the Academy and Salon and the rise of a new, independent art market, and we will watch as artists start emphasizing not just what they see but how they see it (and what they feel about it).

This lecture will include ASL interpretation.