Featuring nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artworks from our collection by artists born in Europe or its colonies, Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art focuses on a period of significant societal transformation, when artistic techniques, subject matter, and patronage underwent profound changes.
The “real and imagined” throughline of the exhibition offers an evocative and flexible lens through which to consider the artworks across five interrelated themes, unbound by chronology, and to encourage critical questions: What is real and what is imagined in works that assert and reflect views of gender, class, labor, colonialism, and nature? Who produces these frames of reference, and for whom? These questions also remind us that the traditional canon of European art history is both imagined and real. It is a construct imagined by and serving a narrow, self-designated constituency, but it has had a very real impact on what has been collected and displayed in museums.
Presented are approximately ninety works by Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Berthe Morisot, Francisco Oller, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, and Vasily Kandinsky, among others.
