French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 exhibits approximately 65 works of art from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European collection and positions France as the artistic center of international modernism from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Ranging widely in scale, subject matter, and style, these paintings, drawings, and sculptures were intended for public display and for private collections, and were produced by the era’s leading artists, those born in France as well as those who studied and showed there, including Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Édouard Vuillard, and more.
The works in the exhibition exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the 19thand 20th centuries, tracing a shift from capturing the visual to evoking the idea, from an emphasis on naturalism to the rise of abstraction.
French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 is organized by Rich Aste, former Curator of European Art, and Lisa Small, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
