The blockbuster art exhibition of 2011 is already at our fingertips. Come Monday, tickets will go on sale for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The arrival of 50 paintings from one of art history's most beloved periods represents a coup for Houston: As Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery repairs, renovates and restores its 19th-century French collection galleries, their top-ranking grouping of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work is making a stop at the MFAH. Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh — they'll all be transported to Houston and unveiled on Feb. 20, 2011.
The works will dazzle in the European galleries of the MFAH's Rafael Moneo-designed Audrey Jones Beck Building, as well as in a fully illustrated 184-page catalogue penned by Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator of French paintings at the National Gallery.
The paintings' bequest may be traced to art collector Andrew W. Mellon, who began collecting within the genre in the 1920s with the intent of forming a national museum. In 1937, he willed the collection to Washington D.C.'s nascent National Gallery.
What we can expect at the MFAH exhibition are crucial canvases from the sequential movements, from Renoir's visions of leisure and femininity, to Cézanne's bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th-century Cubism. Stirring works by such Impressionist and Post-Impressionist standards, such as Manet's renderings of modern urban life and frame-breaking compositions, Monet's scenes of his water garden at Giverny and Van Gogh's asylum stay in the South of France will all be on display.
The hustle and bustle of the blockbuster exhibition is no stranger to the MFAH. The landmark Heroic Century showing of works from the Museum of Modern Art in 2003 and 2007's loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art are just two of several predecessors working in this vein. In the 1980s and 1990s, the museum also mounted monumentally successful exhibitions with loans from the Shanghai Museum, Pushkin Museum and Musée d'Orsay. This time, arguably the greatest artists active in France between the 1860s and the early 20th century are making their mark.
The inter-museum exchange illustrates that art institutions don't have to be necropolises of gilded canvases, but can be instigators of dialogue.
"While museums serve as repositories for the world's art, the collections belong to everyone and serve to enlighten the public about our cultural heritages," says MFAH director Peter Marzio.
However, it takes keen negotiating and an eye to potentially available art to make these exhibitions a reality.
"The National Gallery's director Rusty Powell and I have been colleagues for years," Marzio tells CultureMap. "We started as directors at almost the same time and have collaborated a lot. I heard about the renovation of their galleries before they even announced it, and I thought to myself, 'Gee, instead of them going to storage, we could make an arrangement to get the best of their best pictures.' "
The exhibition was only a phone call away for Marzio, and he soon headed to Washington with two MFAH curators in tow to map out the catalogue.
"It went as smoothly as can be," Marzio recounts. "We met for about a day, and they sort of just said 'yes' to everything. There were only one or two pieces we couldn't get."
The exhibition's timing couldn't be any better, either. When the show comes to a close on May 22, 2011, it will simultaneously usher in the opening of the annual American Association of Museums conference. The conference is officially slated to open on May 22, 2011.
Combined with unique public programs and the Art Car Parade, the National Gallery exhibition will expose Houston's taste for blue-chip works of art to the over 50,000 museum professionals in town.
Remarks Marzio, "Presented in the Moneo-designed Beck Building, even the people who work at the National Gallery will see the pictures in new ways. It's quite exciting."
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art will be on view from Feb. 20 through May 22, 2011. General admission is $20 and $25 for a premium, untimed experience.
"Plum Brandy" by Édouard Manet
