San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum, the first museum of modern art in Texas, opened its doors in 1954.Today, more than 60 years later, the McNay continues to be a trailblazer for national and international modern art exhibitions. 

The recently opened “Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns,” which runs through June 4, 2017, is no exception. The museum’s Tobin Exhibition Gallery walls have been razed so visitors can truly appreciate nearly 60 paintings and sculptures, including many on loan from the Brooklyn Museum.

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926). Rising Tide at Pourville, 1882. Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in. (66 x 81.3cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1260. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). 

Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904). The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, 1869. Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 22 in. (81 x 55.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Joseph Gluck, 74.208. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum).

McNay’s own prized collection and select artworks from local collectors are displayed alongside the Brooklyn Museum’s European art collection. The lone painting not part of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection is Edouard Manet’s “Young Girl on a Bench,” loaned by the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation. 

Thanks to this collaboration, art aficionados will see artworks from Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The sculptures and paintings of lesser known artists are on display as well. 

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917). The Age of Bronze, medium sized model, first reduction, 1876; cast 1967. Bronze, 41 1/4 x 15 x 13 in. (104.8 x 38.1 x 33 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of B. Gerald Cantor. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum).

Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916). Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, circa 1905–10. Oil on canvas, 56 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. (143.5 x 62.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Alexander M. Bing, 60.31. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Translations from English to Spanish on the museum’s giant wall entrance - which sports “De Monet A Matisse” in large, white letters-and near each work of art - are a new addition at the McNay this year. The website also added a tab so Spanish speakers can learn more about the museum and what it offers.

At this exhibition, tables and chairs are set up so lovers of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Realism, Surrealism, Symbolism, and other French Modern styles can contemplate artworks in a more relaxed setting. Moreover, these creature comforts double as interactive education areas.

Alfred Sisley (British, active France, 1839–1899). Flood at Moret, 1879. Oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 28 1/4 in. (54 x 71.8cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of A. Augustus Healy, 21.54. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum).

This exhibition exemplifies the avant-garde movements that spanned one hundred years from 1850 to 1950 when Paris was the center of the art universe. Not only were artists born in France hailed as “modernists,” but so were artists who traveled to Paris from Mexico, Hungary, Russia, and the United States.

Coincidentally, McNay founder and educator, Marion Koogler McNay, had started her own French Modern art collection about the same time the Brooklyn Museum began its inaugural groundbreaking art endeavors in 1921.

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895). Madame Boursier and Her Daughter, circa 1873. Oil on canvas, 29 5/16 x 22 3/8 in. (74.5 x 56.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum). 

“Bringing Brooklyn’s French Collection to the McNay, is a reunion decades in the making,” said Richard Aste, named McNay’s new director in the fall of 2016. Born in Peru, Aste is former Brooklyn Museum curator of European and Latin American art and McNay’s first Hispanic director.

“Our founder, Marion Koogler McNay, was a visionary collector. Putting her keen collecting eye on a par with those of her mostly male peers at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the nation’s pioneering art institutions.” 

In all, some 47 leading international artists who worked in Paris during the French Modernist movement are featured in this exhibition. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries such artists as Vincent van Gogh, Jules Breton, Jean-Francois Millet, and others produced artworks on display in this exhibition.

Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875). Shepherd Tending His Flock, early 1860s. Oil on canvas, 32 3/16 x 39 9/16 in. (81.8 x 100.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William H. Herriman. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). 

Marion Koogler McNay was an artist as well as collector who bequeathed her collection to the museum. Three of McNay’s artworks in this exhibit are: Paul Gauguin’s “Portrait of the Artist with the Idol,” Raoul Dufy’s “Seated Woman-Rosalie,” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Women Crossing the Fields.”

Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886 and discovered Impressionism, characterized by small, thin brushstrokes with an emphasis on changing light. Van Gogh then developed Post-Impressionism, which expresses emotional and psychological response to the world using bold colors and symbolic images.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875). The Young Woman of Albano, 1872. Oil on canvas, 29 3/16 x 25 13/16 in. (74.1 x 65.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 42.196. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919). Still Life with Blue Cup, circa 1900. Oil on canvas, 6 x 13 1/8 in. (15.2 x 33.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, 67.24.19. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum).

Another artist who moved to Paris was African-American painter Lois Mailou Jones. She left the United States to study modernism. The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts has loaned one of her paintings, “At Breakfast,” for this exhibition. Jones once said that in Paris, her skin color didn’t matter.

The exhibition is divided into four distinct areas: Still Life, The Nude, Portraits, and Figures and Landscapes. The collaboration includes input from Lisa Small, Brooklyn Museum curator of European Painting and Sculpture.

A thought-provoking artwork is the bust titled “Woman of African Descent” by Jean Baptiste-Carpeaux. The French sculptor was commissioned to design a fountain for the Luxembourg Gardens. The artist made myriad independent studies for his personification of the continents to be the centerpiece of the fountain.

The plaster bust of “Woman of African Descent” was one of the artworks that resulted from his many studies. Carpeaux’s allusions to slavery did not appear on the commissioned fountain. 

But the gut-wrenching bust, representing an enslaved woman with a rope around her torso with one exposed breast, survived to be displayed in a larger form at the celebrated Paris Salon in 1869. In fact, Emperor Napoleon III purchased “La negresse,” the larger bust created at the same time.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875). Woman of African Descent, 1868. Plaster with patina; red stone base, bust: 13 3/4 x9 1/4 x 7 in. (34.9 x 23.5 x 17.8 cm); base: 9 x 12 ½ x 12 ½ in. (22.9 x 51.8 x 51.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Benno Bordiga, by exchange and Mary Smith Dorward Fund, 1993.83a–b. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). 

Other noteworthy artworks on display include: The Tobin Theatre Arts Fund’s Claude Monet’s masterpiece "Nympheas (Water Lilies)", which graces the back wall of the repurposed Tobin Exhibition Gallery and bring the exhibition to a stunning culmination.

The first major exhibition of modern European art held in the United States was in 1913. A still-life painting of wildflowers by Matisse, “Flowers,” as well as Cezanne’s bucolic “The Village of Gardanne” are also on display in this outstanding exhibition. 

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906). The Village of Gardanne, 1885–86. Oil and conté crayon on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 13/16 in. (92.1 x 73.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund and Alfred T. White Fund, 23.105. (Photo: Brooklyn
Museum). 

A complementary exhibition, “Sur Papier: Works on Paper” highlighting prints and drawings by Renoir, Chagall, and other French Moderns will be on display in McNay’s Charles Butt Paperworks Gallery.

Rene Paul Barilleaux, McNay’s chief curator of contemporary art, is “Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Modern" exhibition organizer and Heather Lammers, director of collections and exhibitions.

The museum is housed in McNay’s 1920s sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival mansion. It is situated in the heart of San Antonio at 6000 N. New Braunfels Ave. For more information, see www.mcnayart.org. 

Giovanni Boldini (Italian, 1842–1931). Portrait of a Lady, 1912. Oil on canvas, 91 x 47 3/4 in. (231.1 x 121.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Anonymous gift, 41.876. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)
 

Rosie Carbo is the Lifestyles Editor for Wandering Educators, and is a former newspaper reporter whose work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. Some of those publications include People magazine, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. Some of her features were redistributed by The Associated Press early in her career as an award-winning Texas journalist.