French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950

French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950 presents sixty paintings and sculptures from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European permanent and long-term loan collections. Identifying France as the artistic centre of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, these works—which are diverse in subject matter, style and scale—were created by leading artists of the period, intended both for private collections and public display. The works in French Moderns exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined Modern art from the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, tracing a formal and conceptual shift from depicting the pictorial to evoking the idea, from a focus on naturalism to the ascendance of abstraction. The exhibition includes examples of the key movements of the period—Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism—that emerged in and around Paris between 1850 and 1950 and quickly became part of the dominant Western canon. Organized primarily chronologically into several sections including The Academy, Breaking from the Academy, The Impressionists and their Circle, Early Modernism, Surrealism and Abstraction, this exhibition offers fine examples of painting and sculpture from this critical century in Western art history.

French Moderns includes work by many celebrated artists including both those native to France, as well as those who trained and exhibited there, such as Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin.