Visitors to Seattle Art Museum’s new show of impressionist paintings will enter a frothy world of luminescent beauty, see jewels, masterpieces, timeless nudes and, beyond that, experience how all art is a link.
The exhibit, “Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past,” opened last weekend at SAM and runs through Sept. 21.
The exhibit, which is really a series of themed mini-exhibits, has nearly 100 works from more than 70 museums and private collections. Many of these pieces have not been seen before on the West Coast, SAM director Mimi Gates told a group during a recent press tour.
And though the museum has exhibited impressionist works before, this new show is different because it’s built on the exercise of comparing and contrasting the work of the impressionists with the works of Italian, Dutch and Spanish artists of earlier times, said Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM’s deputy director of art.
“The show combines great works of art and a great story … and it’s making the impressionists look radical again when paired with the masters,” said Ishikawa during the recent press tour. “The show makes you work more. Visitors engage in Art History 101.”
SAM curators want visitors to be inspired and awed by how much the impressionists learned and were influenced by the earlier artists. In fact, the museum offered another name for the show: “When the Avant-Garde Looked Backward.”
Those avant-garde painters got their early training after the Louvre opened for the first time to the public in 1793. Then, young artists spent hours with their easels in the galleries, filling it to the point where museum officials had to restrict their numbers.
“We always thought (the impressionists) were a radical group but we find they all had a connection to the past — they were steeped in it,” said co-curator of the exhibit, Ann Dumas, a London-based art scholar.
During the recent tour, Dumas quoted Cezanne who once called the Louvre, “The book where we learn to read.”
Roughly half the works in the exhibit are from impressionist painters such as Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Cezanne, Gaugin, Renoir, Morisot, Seurat and Van Gough and half are by artists from earlier periods such as the Italian and Northern Renaissance and Baroque, 17th century Spanish and Dutch, and French and Italian Rococo.
The looking-backward exercise is inspired by the way the smaller exhibits juxtapose paintings from the earlier masters next to these late 19th century artists. For instance, pairings such as Mary Cassatt’s “The Family” (1893) and Bernardino Luini’s “Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John” (1515-1520) gives visitors an eye-opening look at this impressionist updating as the side-by-side presentation shows the similarity between the works while highlighting Cassatt’s secular interpretation of Luini’s traditional religious take.
The exhibit also includes Cezanne’s large-scale “Still Life with Statuette,” a painting whose focal point is a reproduction of a 17th century plaster sculpture of a cherub. Several drawings by Degas were copied from drawings by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, reinforcing Degas’ assertion that, “No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the old masters.”
Dumas called Degas a “staggeringly accomplished draftsman at an early age” whose precision with his later paintings of ballet dancers was rooted in his early training.
The exhibit also features the popular paintings of the “fete champetre” or country feast. There’s also a mini-exhibit dedicated to the timeless nudes, which shows a variety of contrasting beauties such as Francois Boucher’s “Seated Nude” (1749) and Renoir’s “A Bather (1885-90).”
As the tour progressed, Dumas came upon the painting, “A Young Girl Reading” by Jean-Honore Fragonard which she called one of the great masterpieces of the show. Dumas talked about the “incredible freedom of brushwork” the painter possessed.
“There couldn’t be a better example of that type of freedom the impressionists desired,” Dumas said.
A companion show to “Inspiring Impressionists” is “Fresh Impressionism,” where contemporary artists divulge how the past masters have inspired them.
These modern artists, however, have strayed quite a bit in their work in sometimes unexpected ways: a Spanish still life is done with hole punches; a British icon is recreated in a photograph; “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is taken underwater.
This selection of nine works from SAM’s permanent collection focuses on the instinct to honor a master in a fresh way, such as the way Seattle-based artist Jeffry Mitchell honored past masters in his work “In the Great Hall.”
As part of the audio tour, Mitchell talks about how the images from his artistic predecessors come into his “creative mechanism.”
He said: “I do think these things come in and go underground and come back up again, like a cicada or a slow germinating seed.”
Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com
The art of cell phone use
SAM’s “Inspiring Impressionism” exhibit will be the first time visitors to the museum can use their cell phones for an audio tour, giving patrons access to information that has previously only been available on handheld audio players.
The tour features 20 audio tracks for pieces throughout the impressionist exhibit and for pieces in the companion exhibit of contemporary art, “Fresh Impressionism.”
The tour is free and each track is about 1 to 2 minutes long with normal cell phone charges applying, including the use of minutes.
Museums nationwide are catching on to the cell phone tour trend and, if it proves successful here, SAM is likely to convert the permanent audio collection to the new technology.
The audio tour is easy to access: visitors just dial the tour phone number followed by a three-digit audio stop number and the pound key.
The cell phone tour includes an introduction and overview of the show by Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM deputy director of art.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
