Thank goodness for a little spring cleaning.
Due to a major facelift in the halls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Houston will be home to an unprecedented loan of 50 paintings by 17 artists. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art opens Sunday and runs through May 23. Admission to the exhibition requires a timed-ticket, which includes general admission to the museum for $20 (adults) or $15 (children).
The array of works by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and van Gogh offers a gorgeous survey of Impressionist stlye, with works drawn from a truly world-class collection. The MFAH is the only institution to provide these masterpieces a home away from home before they return to Washington, D.C. Since normally such works are constantly on view at the National Gallery, director Earl A. Powell III emphasized that a loan like this one would be “likely never to happen again.”
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces is a testament to the perspicacity of the late Peter Marzio. According to Powell, Marzio contacted the National Gallery as soon as he heard of their plans to renovate.
“We’ve always had a special relationship with the MFAH,” Powell said. Curator Kimberly A. Jones also singled out the MFAH for praise, saying, “I can’t imagine any museum in the U.S. I’d rather have show these works.”
The exhibition provides a potent blend of iconic images and lesser-known worthies. Any lover of the gauzy resplendence and liquid illumination of French Impressionism will find plenty to admire in the gardens, bridges, canoes, peaches, and children that fill the MFAH’s European galleries for the next few months. You might begin by glutting yourself on the sumptuous selections from Claude Monet.
Perhaps the painting with the most immediate appeal, Monet’s 1875 Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son portrays the perfectly luminous presence of the painter’s wife, who appears just above the viewer on a hill with her son. It is as if the clouds behind her are still in motion and her skirt still swirls from turning to look back to where her husband must have been standing with his easel and palette.
Even if you’ve never seen Monet’s 1889 The Japanese Footbridge you’ll find this sensibility familiar. A slender blue bridge arches over a river bursting with lilies. The lush vegetation is so perfectly attuned to the watery landscape that you could easily mistake the grass and flowers for their reflections in the water below.
The first museum I had the opportunity to visit regularly was the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., a gorgeous gallery chock full of the delicate dancers of Edgar Degas. So I was happy to see Auguste Renoir’s 1874 The Dancer in the MFAH exhibit. This little ballerina’s placid gaze and cotton-candy tutu contradict the sheer effort of her posture. Fans of The Dancer might want step over to a smaller room with a few of Mary Cassatt’s masterpieces, including her cherubic Child in a Straw Hat.
Once you make your first pass through the exhibition halls and find all the obvious greatest hits of Impressionism, double back and don’t miss the surprising standouts. I found myself wowed by the works of the lesser-known Frédéric Bazille. Once you lock eyes with the gorgeous Young Woman with Peonies, it’s hard to look away. Who was this young African woman who modeled regularly for Bazille and what did she think of this painter and his colleagues?
Also unfamiliar to me was Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 Skiffs, which captures a perfectly placid moment on a river. The surface of the water and the elegant boats are full of a lazy energy, as if something might happen if you wait long enough.
The two most mind-blowing selections seemed happily discordant with some of the most predictable gestures of Impressionist painting. Edgar Degas spent 30 years worrying over Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey. The result is truly a masterpiece of tensions in a striking cacophony of pinks and browns. The fallen figure of a rider lies in repose, as if merely asleep, as other riders and horses rush furiously past.
That Degas’s own brother, who died before the painting was complete, supplied the face of this fallen rider lends the painting an eerie and resonant quality.
It was hard to tear myself away from Paul Cézanne’s Cubist-leaning Boy in a Red Waistcoat. With his hand confidently placed on a cocked hip, this boy could be straight out of an Italian masterpiece — or a Western.
Boy in a Red Waistcoat appears near the end of the exhibit in a room full of post-Impressionist works. The contrast between these and the earlier paintings is quite instructive. You’ll be pleased to find there what is perhaps the most familiar and iconic work of the show, Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait. Van Gogh peers out from a hypnotic sea of blue with his good ear forward and his palette ready.
I bet he’d set his brushes down long enough to head back and take one last look at some of these masterpieces.
"Plum Brandy" by Édouard Manet
