French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950

French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 exhibits approximately sixty-five works of art from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European collection and privileges France as the artistic center of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth 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 more.

The works in the exhibition exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing a shift from capturing the visual to evoking the idea, from an emphasis on naturalism to the rise of abstraction. French Moderns has been organized into four sections that use these diverse images and styles to explore the themes of the nude, portraiture, landscape, and still life, providing an opportunity for a multidimensional and flexible installation.