French Moderns

This exhibition of approximately 65 works of art from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European collection privileges France as the artistic center of international modernism from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Ranging widely in scale, subject matter and style, these paintings, drawings and sculptures were intended for public display and for private collections and were produced by the era’s leading artists, those born in France as well as those who studied and showed there, including Pierre Bonnard; Gustave Caillebotte; Paul Cézanne; Marc Chagall; Edgar Degas; Jean-Léon Gérôme; Henri Matisse; Jean-François Millet; Claude Monet; Berthe Morisot; Odilon Redon; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Auguste Rodin; Édouard Vuillard and others.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether or not you go, French Moderns: Monet to Matisse 1850-1950 the accompanying book, celebrates France as the artistic center of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Organized into four sections, the works in this book exemplify the successive avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing a shift from naturalism to the rise of abstraction. Chapters on 'Landscape,' 'Still Life,' 'Portraits and Figures,' and 'The Nude,' invite the reader to discover comparisons and contrasts across time and mediums.

French Moderns: Monet to Matisse 1850-1950