Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926). Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement, effet de soleil), 1903. Oil on canvas, 32 x 36 1/4 in. (81.3 x 92.1 cm). Bequest of Grace Underwood Barton, 68.48.1. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

COLUMBIA, SC.- The Columbia Museum of Art announced French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850 – 1950, a major exhibition on view Saturday, October 5, 2024, through Sunday, January 5, 2025. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, French Moderns showcases more than 50 works from its distinguished collection, encompassing the key avant-garde movements that emerged in and around Paris during this period.

The exhibition’s regional debut will be celebrated at the CMA’s French Moderns Preview Party on Friday, October 4. Tickets open to CMA members on Friday, August 23, and to the public on Friday, September 6.

“It is rare for works with this degree of importance and quality to travel outside of major institutions,” says CMA Senior Curator Michael Neumeister. “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.”

In France, the years between the Revolution of 1848 and the end of the World War II were characterized by sweeping social, intellectual, and political change. The 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.

The exhibition is organized thematically in four sections: Landscape, Still Life, Portraits and Models, and The Nude. Beginning with the landscapes of 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.

French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 is organized by Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art, and Richard Aste, former Curator of European Art, Brooklyn Museum. 

October 5, 2024 – January 5, 2025 

Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña (French, 1807–1876). Bathers by a Woodland Stream, 1859. Oil on canvas, 17 3/4 x 23 1/4 in. (45.1 x 59.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gladstone in memory of Sylvia Israel, 85.228 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Camille Jacob Pissarro (Saint Thomas, (former Danish West Indies), 1830–1903, Paris, France). The Climb, Rue de la Côte-du-Jalet, Pontoise (Chemin montant, rue de la Côte-du-Jalet, Pontoise), 1875. Oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 25 7/8 in. (54 x 65.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Dikran G. Kelekian, 22.60 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

In this painting, Camille Pissarro departs from the legible perspectives of traditional landscapes. Using an array of techniques, from touches of paint to broad palette-knife applications, he incorporates multiple viewpoints: looking up the path, down through the trees, and across at the buildings.

This complex treatment of space and form, the solidity and structure of his paint surfaces, and the way he unified his compositions through color and tone reveal his interest in capturing his own perceptual experience unfolding over time. Some contemporaneous viewers found such paintings unintelligible, or too difficult to apprehend superficially, as Pissarro acknowledged in an 1883 letter to his son: “It is only at length that I can hope to please, and then only if there is in those who regard me a grain of indulgence; but for the passerby, the coup d'oeil [a brief glance] is too hasty, he sees only the surface.”

In the mid-1870s Pissarro often painted in Pontoise alongside Paul Cézanne, who said of the older artist, “We learned everything we do from Pissarro.”

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877). The Wave (La Vague), ca. 1869. Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 34 15/16 x 3in. (65.4 x 88.7 x 7.6cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1256 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

This is one of several paintings focusing on cresting waves that Gustave Courbet made in Normandy. The paintings were radical for their anti-picturesque subject and their technique. Referencing his use of a palette knife to slather paint on the canvas in thick strokes, some critics thought the artist’s waves were too solid—too much like undisguised paint—to represent water. Paul Cézanne, who admired Courbet, noted that he “slapped paint on the way a plasterer slaps on stucco.” Popular caricaturists lampooned Courbet’s method.

Author Guy de Maupassant described witnessing Courbet at work on one of his wave paintings in his Étretat studio in 1869: “In a great room a fat, dirty, greasy man was spreading patches of white paint onto a big bare canvas with a kitchen knife. . . . He went and pressed his face against the windowpane to look at the storm. . . . . On the mantelpiece was a bottle of cider. . . . Every now and then Courbet would drink a mouthful and then go back to his painting.”

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926). Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante à Pourville), 1882. Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in. (66 x 81.3cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1260 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

nspired in part by Gustave Courbet’s marines of the 1860s, Claude Monet here conveys the choppy, windswept sea off the Normandy coast in forceful brushstrokes. He emphasizes the dramatic setting of the abandoned customhouse on the edge of the cliff (now gone, as a result of erosion) by cropping the right edge of the canvas and adopting a striking, elevated vantage point.

Monet made a number of paintings along this coast, working on several of them every day (he had to hire a porter to help him carry them all). Each could take as many as twenty sessions to finish. They were marketable back in Paris. In 1882, the year he made this painting, his dealer paid him a total of 31,000 francs (roughly equivalent to $175,000 today

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917). The Age of Bronze, medium-sized model, first reduction (L'Age d'airain, première réduction), 1876 (reduction probably 1903–04); cast 1967. Bronze, 41 1/4 x 15 x 13 in., 65 lb. (104.8 x 38.1 x 33 cm, 29.48kg). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of B. Gerald Cantor, 68.49. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

This male nude is one of Auguste Rodin’s most celebrated and enigmatic subjects. First called The Vanquished, it was interpreted as emblematic of France’s heroism and suffering in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. When Rodin decided to remove the lance the model posed with, he also eliminated any explicit narrative symbols in favor of simply highlighting the sensuality and emotional potential of the human body. He retitled it The Age of Bronze, suggesting that the figure, with its now mysterious gestures, evoked a moment of awakening into a new consciousness. At the 1877 Salon, the naturalism of the life-size plaster led to accusations that Rodin had made a cast directly from the “commonplace” body of his model.

The half-life-size version seen here was probably first produced in 1903–4 in response to popular demand for a smaller-format edition.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Paris, France, 1796–1875, Paris, France). The Young Woman of Albano (L'Albanaise), 1872. Oil on canvas, 29 3/16 x 25 13/16 in. (74.1 x 65.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 42.196 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Along with 42.195, this painting of a pale, contemplative young woman dressed in garments that conjure past times or distant places exemplifies Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s practice as a figure painter. In this painting, a favorite model, Emma Dobigny, reclines in a theatrical “gypsy” costume, while a trio of maidens in the background dance or perhaps engage in a physical contest reflecting the athleticism for which ancient Sparta was renowned. The other portrays the model Mlle Darmelas wearing the traditional attire of the Italian town of Albano and gazing pensively into space. For Corot such costumes were interchangeable referents for imagined worlds, as well as opportunities to explore color, pattern, and texture in delicate touches of paint.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges, France, 1841–1919, Cagnes–sur–Mer, France). The Vineyards at Cagnes (Les Vignes à Cagnes), 1908. Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 21 3/4 in. (46.4 x 55.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Colonel and Mrs. Edgar W. Garbisch, 51.219 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Here, Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts a woman reading beneath an olive tree on his estate near Cagnes, in the South of France. The property offered panoramic views of the countryside, and he made many such landscapes there, capturing radiant light, lush vegetation, and moments of quiet leisure in colorful, feathery brushstrokes. Although his freely handled technique is quintessentially modern, his composition—foreground trees framing the receding landscape and distant mountain—recalls the orderly compositional structure of seventeenth-century landscapes, with trees framing a distant vista.