Impressive exhibit at Brooks includes works from masters

The exhibition at the Brooks Museum of Art includes Claude Monet's "Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil," painted by the French impressionist in 1873.

First impressions are important, so Memphis' second major Impressionist art exhibit this summer is likely to get a boost from the first.

"A Very Impressionistic Summer" continues with the opening Saturday of "Monet to Cezanne/Cassett to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution" at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The exhibition of almost 100 works was organized by the Brooks and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, though the local advertising and marketing campaign, "A Very Impressionistic Summer," is a collaboration between the Brooks and Dixon Gallery and Gardens, whose show "Jean-Louis Forain: La Comedie parisienne," opened on June 26.

Photo by High Museum of Art

"Woman Arranging Her Hat," ca. 1890, by Pierre-August Renoir.

Camille Pissarro's "Road to Marly" is included in the "The Impressionist Revolution."

A purchase of one ticket at either museum entitles the holder to visit the exhibitions at both museums; each will be displayed through Oct. 9. Members of each museum will receive free admission to the other museum's exhibition.

Emily H. Halpern, spokesperson for the Dixon, said that since the Forain exhibition opened on June 26, "we have seen very robust attendance, at least double the amount of visitors from the same time last year," an estimate that speaks favorably about the cooperative effort between two local institutions.

As is often the case in the museum world, "The Impressionist Revolution" came about because of a fortuitous chain of events.

"The High had an exhibition coming in that necessitated removing all their Impressionist works, actually 48," said Stanton Thomas, curator of European and decorative art at the Brooks. "We graciously offered to provide a temporary home for them, and the High graciously lent them to us. And of course at the same time the Dixon had to take down a great deal of its permanent collection of Impressionist works because of the Forain show, so we borrowed some of their pieces too."

Add works from the Brooks' own collection and a few from private collectors, and -- voila! -- an exhibition that serves almost as a retrospective look at French and American art of the last half of the 19th and into the 20th century.

Of course "The Impressionist Revolution" includes, as dictated by the first part of its title, works by such pioneering and important Impressionist, post-Impressionist and related artists as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Albert Sisley, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne. Yet as the second part of the title indicates, there are also pieces by American artists like Mary Cassett and John Singer Sargent and others including Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Theodore Robinson (who lived next-door to Monet at Giverny in the late 1880s), Frederick Carl Frieseke, George Luks and William Glackens.

The exhibition also incorporates works by artists of the French Barbizon School, a sort of open-air precursor of Impressionism, and examples of academic paintings that were exhibited at the official Salon in Paris; the latter represent the kind of supremely polished, sophisticated art that Monet, Pissarro and other Impressionists rejected.

"Our hope is to place Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in a cultural context," said Thomas, "by offering some interesting works that people don't always see and providing background information for people to learn something beyond just looking at some very pretty pictures."

Make no mistake; many of these pictures are very pretty indeed.

"I know!" Thomas said. "We were uncrating these pieces and I thought, 'How was this ever considered revolutionary?' They're filled with so much light!"

The revolution accomplished by the Impressionists in the 1870's and 1880's wasn't just about painting outside in nature, loosening the brush and depicting light in a scientific manner but about modern life. Easy to overlook in some of these landscapes might be a railroad train crossing a trestle, a distant factory with smoke drifting from a tall chimney, farmers and peasants depicted not as means to allegorical or idealized ends but simply as humble, hard-working laborers. What the Impressionists avoided, and actually destroyed as subject matter, were historical epic, myth, the grandiose, the sublime and the symbolic.

The summer of 2011 is not the first time that the Brooks and the Dixon have shown tandem exhibitions of Impressionism or Impressionist-related works. Just in the first decade of the 21st century, for example, the museums displayed, late in 2007, "Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape" (Brooks) and "American Impressionism: Paintings from the Phillips Collection" (Dixon) and, opening in August 2004, "An Impressionist Eye: Paintings and Sculpture from the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation" (Brooks) and "French and American Impressionism: Rediscover the Permanent Collection" (Dixon).

This is, however, a unique collaboration in advertising and marketing planned, both coincidentally and cannily -- Thomas used the term "happy coincidence" -- for what might be called high tourist season in Memphis, especially in early August for Elvis Presley International Tribute Week.

As Thomas said, "We and the Dixon are collaborating on these efforts. We're not staging rival shows but shows that complement each other. Impressionism remains incredibly popular, and it will be nice to have these exhibitions up during a season when a lot of people come to town."

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"Monet to Cezanne/Cassatt to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution"

Opens Saturday at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and runs through Oct. 9. For details about opening weekend activities and a list of events throughout the run of the exhibition, visit brooksmuseum.org. Call (901) 544-6200.

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