The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Introduction
In the second half of the nineteenth century, art developed and redefined itself with a rapidity that matched the century's equivalent revolutions in modern technology, economics, politics and warfare. Paris became in these decades the crucible in which the subsequent course of modern art was formed. The Impressionists, drawn principally from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, together with selected loans from French and Australian public and private lenders, assembles the most comprehensive survey of late 19 th century French painting yet to be staged in Australia.
Master works by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Courbet and Frédéric Bazille document the climate of dynamic change in which Impressionism emerged in the 1860s and 1870s. A dazzling array of Impressionist landscape paintings by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, are matched by entrancing portraits and figure studies by Berthe Morisot and Auguste Renoir. Magnificent paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec provide a vibrant contrast to the more gentle lyricism of these classic Impressionist artists. Above all else, the Impressionists fought for the freedom to be themselves. The Impressionists also examines the liberating impact of Impressionism upon the younger generation of artists who came to prominence in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s - embracing Symbolism's demands for the revival of dreams and the imagination in art; continuing the legacy of Paul Gauguin's fascination with the wild romanticism of Brittany and other, isolated regions of rural France; or focusing with extraordinary intensity upon the 'theatre' of daily domestic life. The 91 outstanding paintings in The Impressionists narrate, with gripping intensity, a half-century of phenomenal change in our perceptions and experience of the modern world.
