There are only a few weeks left to catch the “Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism” exhibition on at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The show comprises 38 paintings from the Joslyn Art Museum’s Impressionist collection and the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, a selection of mid nineteenth to early twentieth-century French and American landscapes. The likes of Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet are joined by some of the more important American Impressionists of the time, such as Frederick Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent.

Other French artists included in this joint venture between the Joslyn Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin and Jules Breton. There are also a number of American artists who lived and painted in Giverny, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Leroy Metcalf and Julian Alden Weir. Impressionism was not a definable style with a unified set of principles, but rather a group of artists who came together with shared ideas. The juxtaposition of various paintings enables viewers to appreciate this first-hand.

Also on exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum at this time are three paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The three paintings from Boston that make up a small companion exhibit, entitled Beyond Impressionism, are:
Vincent van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with Ploughman, painted in 1889
Claude Monet’s Meadow at Giverny, painted in 1886
Paul Gauguin’s Women and a White Horse, painted in 1903

The two exhibitions are on until 12 September 2010. For further details, visit the Joslyn Art Museum’s website, click here.

The Normandy Impressionist Festival is in full swing, with an impressive and diverse programme of events taking place throughout Normandy, some of which last up until November. Most however end in September. So if you are planning to come to Normandy, or have been thinking about it – it really is not too late to catch some of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 buzz.

Rouen is a focus for this exhibition, for all sorts of reasons, and the organising committee and the various administrative departments in the city have not wasted any opportunity to associate the usual annual events that take place in that city with the Impressionist Festival. For example, the inauguration of Arne Quinze’s installation ‘Camille’ on Rouen’s Bastille Day celebrations.

And, for Impressionist fans like myself, Impressionism is really everywhere in the city of Rouen. I thought I would share these photographs with MGN readers who were not able to make it to Rouen, or Normandy to enjoy the Festival. The image above is a standard poster advertising the exhibition in the Fine Arts Museum of Rouen – one of the highlights in which are 8 versions of Monet’s painting of the Rouen cathedral. In the photograph below the logo of the ‘Normandie Impressionniste 2010′ festival is projected onto one of the administrative buildings for the Department of Seine Maritime.

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I could go on talking about Monet for hours! I’m absolutely fascinated by this artist and by the way he painted. His paintings about his gardens in Giverny are mystical and mysterious, but also experimental and he kept studying on them. He could dive into a subject and paint it over and over to make it look exactly like the vision he had in mind. Monet was one of the first abstract painters, he was keen on experimenting and creating a new art movement. Arne Quinze

The city of Rouen is one of a number of towns and cities in Normandy taking part in one of the greatest festivals in celebration of Impressionism and the Impressionist artists in 2010. To mark this occasion in a grand way, Arne Quinze was commissioned to create an installation; he created Camille for Rouen, a tribute to Camille Doncieux, Claude Monet’s wife.

This amazing installation has been constructed out of ’sticks’ of wood that creates a kind of canopy over the Boieldieu Bridge that spans the River Seine. The official launch of Arne Quinze’s Camille in Rouen was at the beginning of July, and it will remain in place until the end of August.

Read more about the artwork in an interview on the Irenebrination: Notes on Art, Fashion and Style website with Arne Quinze about Camilleand Rouen here. (From where the above quote from Quinze was taken.)

I took the following photographs on Bastille Day, 14 July 2010, in the afternoon and then in the evening during the spectacular firework display that lasted for some 25 minutes.

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The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, will host a major exhibition of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. for the first half of 2011.

The Houston show will have a selection of 50 paintings from the National Gallery of Art´s 19th century French collection while the galleries that usually house these works are closed for repair and renovation. The National Gallery´s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection includes work from the greatest artists active in France from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century, a collection that ranks amongst the finest of any collection in the world. These include works by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh.

‘Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art’ is to be installed in the MFAH’s European galleries, Audrey Jones Beck Building. The MFAH’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art will be kept on display for the duration of the temporary exhibition. But, about 50 works from other periods will be temporarily removed to make way for the loan pieces.

To accompany the exhibition will be a 184-page, fully illustrated book that provides a history of the collection and individual entries on each painting.

The exhibition opens 20 February, and runs through to 22 May 2011. Entry will be by timed-entry tickets, and these go on sale from 13 December 2010. Click here to link through to the Museum of Fine Arts’ website.

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol —Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875. Oil on canvas, 19.48 cm x 24 cm @ The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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The two museums that make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young and the Legion of Honor, are hosting concurrently two exhibitions on Impressionist art. The Birth of Impressionism exhibition at the de Young has one hundred masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. And, to provide a historical context to these well-known paintings, the Legion of Honor is hosting Impressionist Paris: City of Light.

With the invention and installation of the gas street lamp in the nineteenth century, Paris earned itself the name ‘city of light’. The street lights and their evening glow attracted a great deal of attention from various artists, authors, composers, but particularly visual artists, including painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. And it was at about this time that the group of painters who would come to be known as the Impressionists were starting out in Paris.

The exhibition at the Legion of Honor explores various aspects of Parisian society and French art from about 1850 through to the end of the nineteenth century. On show are more than 180 prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, as well as illustrated books dating from 1850 to the early 1900s, taken from the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and other distinguished private collections.

There are picturesque, old views of the narrow streets and stone bridges by Charles Marville and Charles Meryon as well as colorful images of a more modern Parisian setting by such artists as Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Georges Seurat. Various prints and periodicals which feature the work of Honoré Daumier, Edouard Manet, Paul Signac, and James Tissot convey significant events in the rise of illustrated art journalism. Black-and-white works on paper by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Paul Gauguin reveal another aspect of Parisian culture at this time. There are also galleries that are devoted to popular entertainment in late 19th-century Paris, including colorful images of the theater, café-concerts, circus, as well as the Expositions Universelles. The exhibition concludes with a colourful selection of posters from the turn of the 20th century by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, Théophile Steinlen, and Alphonse Mucha.

“This exhibition gives us a special opportunity to show off some of the Fine Arts Museums’ greatest treasures from its holdings of 19th-century French works on paper, including an outstanding group of new acquisitions that will be shown here for the first time,” says exhibition curator James A. Ganz. “It is conceived as a journey from the dark alleys of ‘Old Paris,’ at the dawn of the Impressionist era, to a world of color and light, culminating in a gallery of vibrant French posters from the turn of the 20th century.”

Charles Marville, Street lamp, 8 Place de l’Opera, 1870s. Albumen silver print from wet-colldion-on-glass negative © The Legion of Honor.

Impressionist Paris: City of Light at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, runs from 5 June to 26 September 2010.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition on the Legion of Honor’s website. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

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Oh to be in San Francisco this summer! The beautiful West Coast city aside, the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young and the Legion of Honor, are hosting two major Impressionist exhibitions. At de Young is Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, while the Legion of Honor is hosting Impressionist Paris: City of Light, a special exhibition that provides historical background to de Young’s Birth of Impressionism show.

Through one hundred paintings of some of the great artists living and painting in France from the mid to late nineteenth century this exhibition demonstrates the changes that took place in Western art at this time, i.e. the birth of what was to be called Impressionism.

The following is a list of just a few of the paintings on display at de Young this summer:
The Fife Player by Edouard Manet (1866)
Racehorses Before the Stands by Edgar Degas (1866–1868)
Family Reunion by Frédéric Bazille (1867)
The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868)
The Cradle by Berthe Morisot (1872)
The Dancing Lesson by Edgar Degas (1873–1876)
The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte (1875)
The Swing by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)
Red Roofs, Corner of the Village, Winter Effect by Camille Pissarro (1877)
Saint-Lazare Station by Claude Monet (1877)
Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878 by Claude Monet (1878)
Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley (1878)
L’Estaque by Paul Cézanne (1878–1879)
Portraits at the Stock Exchange by Edgar Degas (1878–1879)
The Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879)

An impressive list of artists and paintings indeed!

Claude Monet. Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878. 1878. Oil on canvas. 49 cm x 80 cm. ©RMN, Musée d’Orsay.

Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay at de Young runs from 22 May through to 6 September, 2010. This exhibition will be followed by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, 25 September 2010 until 18 January 2011.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

Get your copy of the exhibition catalogue from Amazon before you go:

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The first major exhibition of Claude Monet’s work in over 30 years will take place at the Grand Palais in Paris from September 22, 2010 to January 24, 2011. It has been reported that there will be over 200 paintings on display from both French and foreign museums.

This showcase event for the Paris arts calendar in 2010 will trace the 19th century painter’s long career, starting with his early landscapes in Normandy and the Paris region from the 1870s through to the iconic and well known depictions of his garden and ponds in Giverny.

Following a major Picasso show at the Grand Palais in 2008 that attracted 784,000 visitors, the Monet exhibition is predicted to attract in excess of half a million visitors.

In anticipation of the vast numbers of people expected to attend the exhibition, and in an attempt to allow people to book tickets in advance so as not to be disappointed during their forthcoming trips to Paris, tickets will be available online as of Monday 19 April 2010.

Update: book your tickets here.

Not only is the exhibition itself one not to be missed by anyone with a passion for Claude Monet’s art, or impressionist art in general, but the setting in the Grand Palais will provide a wonderful ambiance. Built for the Universal Exhibition in 1900, the Grand Palais covers some 775,000 square feet in the form of an H and its glass roof is recognisable from a long distance, the biggest in Europe.

See also the following article that gives details of the three museums with paintings by Monet in Paris.

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“Clemenceau came to pay us a visit after lunch and stayed until 5 o’clock. … He was so amazed by the garden, and the water lilies, that he said to his daughter as he left: ‘You know, on the way home we are going to sell Bernouville, there is nothing more to be done after seeing Monet’s garden!’” Alice Monet, June 1909*

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, has in its collection a number of Claude Monet’s paintings of the pond he created, the water lilies and the Japanese bridge. These include the large triptych, Water Lilies (1914–26), a painting of the water lilies in the pond, Water Lilies (1914–26), The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26).

These paintings have a special status within MoMA’s collection, this museum was the first public collection in the United States of America to acquire one of Monet’s large-scaled paintings. For a limited time, these paintings, and two loans of similar paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be on show for the first time in MoMA’s new Manhattan building.

“Monet’s Water Lilies” will be on show until 12 April 2010. A book, titled Claude Monet: Water Lilies by Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence, that recounts the history of Monet’s water lilies paintings in the Museum’s collection has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

Claude Monet. Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows. 1914–1926. Oil on canvas. 51 1/4″ x 78 3/4″ (130.2 x 200 cm). Private collection. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Look in the photograph at the top of this article to see the reflections of the weeping willows on Monet’s pond.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition on MoMA’s website. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

*Quote from page 57, Monet’s Garden in Giverny inventing the landscape. 2009. Musées des Impressionnismes, Giverny.

“Dieppe is a wonderful place for a painter who likes life, movement and colour.” Camille Pissarro, 1902

In the 1820s Dieppe became one of France’s premier swimming resorts. In the following decades the town became very popular with artists, particularly painters, and for the impressionists Dieppe was a gift, as the above quote from Pissarro shows. The painters were attracted by the light, the wind, the sea and the air. And the town itself presented painters with varied sources of inspiration, great views of the sea from striking white cliffs, as well as the bustling activities of a busy seaside port.

As a result we have a great collection of paintings by some great artists. As part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 Festival the Château-Musée of Dieppe will bring together some of these paintings of Dieppe and surrounds: “Claude, Camille, Jacques-Emile, Eva et les autres … Les Impressionnistes à Dieppe.” Besides the well-known Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Paul Gaugin and Auguste Renoir, other artists also on display will be Eugène Boudin, Alfred Sisley, Jacques-Emile Blanche and Eva Gonzalès; with paintings of the sea and the country, Dieppe and other nearby rural villages such as Pourville and Varengeville.

Exhibition Dates: 27 June – 27 September 2010
Venu: Château-Musée, Rue de Chastes, Dieppe

In 2010 the two administrative departments that constitute Upper Normandy will be co-hosting what promises to be a wonderful celebration of impressionism – Normandie Impressionniste 2010.

Impressionist art is synonymous with Upper Normandy; in fact this part of France is better known by many people around the world through the paintings a number of impressionist artists made here. Claude Monet lived and died in the small village of Giverny, and the Seine Valley, the various cities of Upper Normandy, and the natural landscape such as the white, seaside cliffs were the subjects of some of the most well-known impressionist paintings.

There are currently over 150 events on the programme, which include a variety of fine art and photographic exhibitions, musical performances, theatrical and outdoor performances that pay tribute to all aspects of the impressionist artists and their lives and times in Normandy. Over the next few weeks the details of these events will be posted here, and as the programme is up-dated those details will be added as well.

So if French impressionist art is your passion, and you have not already made plans for a summer holiday or a weekend break, it is not too late to start planning now. If you have already made plans to visit Normandy this summer, do return as I will be posting details of the various events on the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 programme.

For details of what is on the programme follow this link: Normandie Impressionniste 2010 Programme