Faces of Impressionism:
Portraits from American Collections

May 28-July 30, 2000

Countless Impressionist exhibitions in the United States and abroad have offered museumgoers the chance to fully appreciate one artist's career, to immerse themselves in favorite landscapes, or to marvel at the great and diverse collections of Impressionist masterpieces amassed by discerning connoisseurs. The exhibition Faces of Impressionism: Portraits from American Collections gives visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art an intimate view of these artists' lives through paintings of people whose stories are entwined with theirs. Fifty-nine paintings by 15 artists are included. Four have been added for the Cleveland showing only. More than 30 public and private collections across the United States, including the CMA, are represented.

CMA director Katharine Lee Reid explained the appeal of this particular show: "What we get to see in this exhibition is the Impressionists tackling the grand European tradition of portraiture with their revolutionary painting vocabulary and their inclination to spontaneity. The paintings are compelling not only because the subjects are people - unique human beings just like ourselves - but because most of them reveal the artists' perspectives on their relatives and closest friends."

Faces of Impressionism premiered last autumn at The Baltimore Museum of Art, which organized the exhibition. It traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (through May 7, 2000). It will open here May 28 and remain on view through July 30, 2000. The Cleveland showing is sponsored by MBNA America.

Impressionism is best known for light-filled paintings of Paris and the French countryside, but the Impressionists also explored portrait painting, both following tradition and breaking with it. They sometimes accepted commissions to paint subjects in flattering poses, such as Renoir's Romaine Lacaux or Marie-Thérèse Durand-Ruel Sewing (selected for the exhibition's catalogue cover). More often they captured friends and family engaged in everyday activities. The paintings in Faces of Impressionism range from individual and group portraits to figures in landscapes and self-portraits; they date from about 1855 to about 1905.

Sylvain Bellenger, CMA's curator of 19th-century European painting, is overseeing the exhibition at its Cleveland venue. Asked what will be most important and memorable to visitors to Faces of Impressionism, he said:

I believe this show will make people think more of these great painters as intensely original masters, not as members of a 'movement.' Their solidarity was in their struggle against the same cause - the academy they viewed as stagnant or frozen - rather than for a common cause. When they focused on people, they faced the particular constraints of portrait painting: its exhaustive exploration by their predecessors among Western painters from the Renaissance onward, and their own audience's expectations of resemblance to a person.

Each artist spent hours and hours in the Louvre studying its many masterpieces, but their resulting works are intensely original. Their personal quests for unique, modern expressions of portraiture led their inventive minds down distinctive paths, giving us the particular interest of Degas in Renaissance portraiture and later in the movement of dancers; echoes of the Spanish school in Manet and of England's Turner in Monet; or Cézanne's psychologically bereft sitters (whom he seemed to approach not much differently than apples or Mont Ste. Victoire). Cassatt's mother-and-child images hardly ever depict actual mothers with their own children, but they are, in my view, the modern descendants of many affectionate Madonnas.

Faces of Impressionism reveals a roughly chronological evolution of the Impressionist approach to portraiture, including forerunners and successors.

It begins with pictures from the 1850s and 1860s, showing the early impact of influential French painters whose names may not be so well known to the broad general public, among them: Gustave Courbet, a leading figure in realism, who often held private exhibitions; Thomas Couture, a proponent of Spanish painting and of the importance of masterful brushwork, and teacher of such painters as Manet; and Jean-Frédéric Bazille, who painted his own Self-Portrait gazing at the viewer over his shoulder as though just interrupted, grasping his palette and brushes. (Bazille may look familiar: he posed for his close friend Manet's infamous Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.)

The painters generally grouped together as Impressionists originally exhibited together as "independent" artists in 1874 - independent of the Salon, the accepted academy exhibitions, that is - and continued to do so almost every year until 1886. Faces of Impressionism shows these artists expanding on the domestic portrait and the patron portrait in the 1870s and 1880s.

Camille Pissarro painted multiple portraits of his beloved daughter, Minette, before her untimely death from illness in childhood. Manet painted The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil in the summer of 1874, making Monet's wife and son the focus of the idyllic scene, while Monet, a secondary figure, tends his beloved flowers. Manet's very different Portrait of Clemenceau at the Tribune shows a man who is clearly important, though without the fashionable trappings or fancy background that were traditional clues in portraits, with determination in his crossed-arm posture and his official speech lying in front of him on an impressive balustrade.

The exhibition concludes with the Post-Impressionists, including Degas, whose younger brother René once complained that he barely walked in the door from school when forced by his brother to pose; Cézanne, whose Victor Choquet in an Armchair portrays an art connoisseur who owned more than 30 of Cézanne's paintings; and Gauguin, including his enigmatic portrayal of his son Clovis and his portrait of his cellist friend in action, Upaupa Schneklud (The Player Schneklud).

Four of CMA's paintings have been traveling with the show and will now return "home" as part of it: Manet's Berthe Morisot, one of more than 10 portraits Manet made of his fellow artist, both before and after she married his brother; Monet's portrait of his wife seen through closed French doors, La Capeline rouge (The Red Cape, Camille Monet in the Snow); Morisot's picture of her sister Edma seated in a meadow, Reading (La Lecture) - one of the paintings on view known to have been in the very first "Impressionist" exhibition; and Renoir's commissioned portrait of a nine-year-old girl, Romaine Lacaux.

Caillebotte's Portrait of a Man, normally on long-term loan to the museum from Cleveland collector Mrs. Noah L. Butkin, has also been traveling in the exhibition. Caillebotte depicted gentlemen of his own upper-class millieu, like this unidentified man gazing out Caillebotte's apartment window. Says Bellenger, "What is modern in this beautiful painting is a certain impenetrability - is he happy? intelligent? witty or lively? - you simply can't read the man."

The CMA has added four paintings to the exhibition that are not represented in its catalogue. The most important Cleveland-only addition is the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Degas painting, Portrait of Mlle Fiocre à Propos du Ballet "La Source." The other three are lesser-known works from CMA's collection: one is earlier than any other work on exhibition, Couture's A Volunteer of 1792 (1848); the others are Courbet's Laure Borreau and Adolphe Félix Cals's Card Game at "le Père Martin."

Two other paintings are on view at CMA that were not in the exhibition's original Baltimore Museum of Art showing (though they joined the show in Houston): Cézanne's Self-Portrait and Degas's Melancholy, both from The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Referring to Cézanne's Self-Portrait, the late collector Duncan Phillips summed up the portrait painter's achievement: "...the subtle, solid modeling of that head of an old lion of a man, the pride and the loneliness of him so directly conveyed by purely plastic means."

(Four works in the catalogue will not be in the Cleveland showing: one each by Cassatt, Degas, Manet, and Renoir.)

The exhibition was designed by Jeffrey Baxter. Chris Tyler is chief lighting designer. Katherine Solender is exhibitions manager.

The great early photographer Nadar, friend of many of these painters, in whose studio the artists organized their very first rebellious exhibition, will be among the artists in a complementary exhibition, 19th-Century French Portrait Photography from the Cleveland Museum of Art . This selection of 22 portraits by 19 artists will reveal why the pioneering French photographers were critically acclaimed in their time for the technical and aesthetic quality of their portraits. This free exhibition will be on view in gallery 102 (May 27-Aug. 9, 2000).

In the Asian galleries, room 113 will be devoted to examples of Japanese portraits from the museum's collection of Edo Period (1615-1868) paintings and prints (June 25th-Aug. 27, 2000).

Faces of Impressionism is a time-ticketed exhibition. Tickets go on sale to the public May 2, 2000. Advance purchase of tickets is strongly recommended. Tickets can be purchased in person at the museum's ticket center, by phone at (216) 421-7350 or 1-888-CMA-0033, or online. Ticket prices are $8 Tuesday-Friday and $10 Saturday and Sunday, with discounts for students, seniors, and groups; free for children under age six.

Special expanded exhibition hours are Tuesday & Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The Thursday and Saturday evenings and the 5-6 p.m. hours are for the exhibition only.

CMA members are admitted to Faces of Impressionism free, but need admission tickets; memberships are $40 for individuals and $55 for families with discounts for students and seniors as well as higher level memberships with additional benefits. See the membership area for more details.

Museum admission is free. Hours for the rest of the museum: Tuesdays-Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesdays & Fridays until 9 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays, except for this Memorial Day holiday (May 29), when Faces of Impressionism will be open.

A self-guided audio tour utilizing state-of-the-art MP3 technology is available for $4 per person ($3 for CMA members). Introduced by CMA director Katharine Lee Reid, the tour offers about 25 lively messages (1-2 minutes each) including remarks from CMA curator Sylvain Bellenger. This Antenna tour can be rented at the door or reserved in advance through the CMA ticket center.

Several Greater Cleveland hotels are offering special room packages for Faces of Impressionism. See this website <link to hotels> or call 1-888-CMA-0033 for a list. For information about visiting Cleveland, call the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland at 1-877-980-5400 or visit www.travelcleveland.com. For a Continental Airlines discount, call 1-800-468-7022 and reference event code IYVJ71.

An evening garden party, Moonlit Monet: A Summer Soirée is being organized by the museum's Young Friends to benefit CMA's outreach program "Generation XL" (June 17). A Thursday evening lecture series will feature experts on Impressionism from London and across the United States. Three Wednesday evening concerts will be devoted to French music. Gallery talks, storytelling, and family hands-on workshops are also planned. CMA Speakers Bureau presentations about the show are available to groups of 15 or more. All of these and other public programs complementing this show are free except the benefit party ($65). See a full programs listing.

More than half the merchandise in the CMA's exhibition store, to be housed in a 40- x 60-foot tent outside the main entrance, will be products produced by the CMA especially for visitors of all ages to this exhibition. They will include 10 posters; series of mugs and t-shirts based on exhibition images; beach towels, scarves, tote bags, umbrellas, and numerous decorative items based on Monet's Water Lilies and other CMA Impressionist paintings; a snowdome based on Monet's La Capeline rouge (The Red Cape, Camille Monet in the Snow), a doll based on Renoir's Romaine Lacaux, and blown glass perfume bottles.

The exhibition's 168-page catalogue, co-published by The Baltimore Museum of Art and Rizzoli International, will be available for $40 (hardback) or $29.95 (paperback).

The exhibition store will be open for the extended exhibition hours. Much of the merchandise will also be available at the Beachwood Place store and the airport store.

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Faces of Impressionism is organized and circulated by The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cleveland showing is sponsored by MBNA America. Promotional support is provided by The Plain Dealer, Soft Rock 102.1, AM850 WRMR, and WKYC Channel 3.