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February 23, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > La piece de resistance

La piece de resistance

Students given free fare to rare French art

By Risa Gordon | Thresher staff

Introductory art history comes alive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s special exhibition, The Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800-1920. The three-month show — open until May 6 — vividly illustrates the movement of French art throughout the 19th century and displays some of the most famous works from the time.

Helga Aurisch, assistant curator of European art at the MFAH and coordinator of the exhibition, said the exhibition brings together the most influential artists and their signature works.

“It is going to be a historical show because it is just such a treasure,” Aurisch said. “Even when you go to the Met, you may not see all of these paintings aligned next to each other because there are other paintings by the same painter, which may not be as well known or quite as wonderful, mixed in with them. Here we just really have the best of the best.”

The MFAH is the only American museum to receive the 135-piece collection, which is on loan while the Met renovates its 19th-century gallery. The exhibition will also travel to Berlin, where it will spend four months at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

It was a huge coup for the MFAH when the Met chose the sixth-largest museum in the United States to serve as the only American host of the exhibition, the largest the Met has ever loaned out. Although other museums were willing to pay larger lenders’ fees to the Met, it was the MFAH’s track record handling special exhibitions earned it the honor, Aurisch said.

“A couple years ago, we had a big show here from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and [the show] was done so well that it instilled the confidence in the Metropolitan Museum that our staff would do a good job with their treasures,” Aurisch said. “No matter how much you pay for these things to come, if you damage one, it wasn’t worth [the risk].”

While it usually takes about three years to coordinate a special exhibition, Masterpieces was put together in only 10 months, Aurisch said. The art arrived in 13 truck shipments and six plane shipments — separated due to the size of the collection and to prevent such valuable artwork from traveling together. The total cost of the exhibition is about $6 million, which includes the confidential lender’s fee, transportation and insurance, Aurisch said.

Only three weeks into the exhibition, the MFAH has seen a rise in visitors and expects the total number of visitors to exceed the record set with the Museum of Modern Art show in 2003-‘04, Aurisch said.

The exhibition, which represents about one-third of the Met’s total collection from this period, temporarily replaces part of the MFAH’s permanent collection, which has been placed in storage, in the Audrey Jones Beck Building. Not all of the Met’s 19th-century French collection could travel to Houston because some of the works are too large or delicate to travel, or because they have been restricted from leaving the Met by bequest terms, Aurisch said.

The chronological arrangement of the art clearly shows the varied movements in French art, ranging from early Neo-Classicism and its counter-movement, Romanticism, to Impressionism and Cubism. Nearly all of the major players from these movements are represented in the art, including Delacroix, Degas, Van Gogh and Monet. The collection of Impressionist artwork is particularly strong, allowing the visitor to grasp the movement away from the polished, Classical subject matter of the French academies. The academies taught artists to work in the accepted style of the time, capturing the light and movement in outdoor — plein air — painting.

As Aurisch mentioned, a primary benefit of the small selection of artwork is the opportunity to directly compare different art schools. The popular academic art sits directly adjacent to Monet’s Impressionist style, and each is breathtaking in its own way. Meissonier’s “Friedland, 1807” is a 13-year effort that vividly portrays Napoleon’s army, accurate down to the buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms. The large painting looks real enough to allow viewers to step into the grass blowing in the wind at the foreground. Juxtaposed just a few steps away, Monet’s “Ice Floes” presents a world of whites, grays and blacks. Although the style is far different from the photographic realism of the academics, Monet also presents a realistic view of light effects in winter.

Among the more famous pieces in the collection is Daumier’s “The Third-Class Carriage,” a character study of the working poor riding on the train, an increasingly popular mode of transportation. The painting comments on the social situation of the time by giving dignity to the weary, lined faces of the poor.

While Degas’s ballet paintings are standards in museums around the world due to the large quantity he produced over the second half of his life, one of the three paintings — the surprisingly small “The Dancing Class”— in the exhibition stands out because it is thought to be the first of his ballet paintings.

Similarly, Monet’s “La Grenouillere” is a pivotal work in his painting career.

“It’s really the first time Monet looks at how light is reflected on water,” Aurisch said. “From [far away], you can see that the water is sort of this shimmering surface. When you get up close, all you see is one brushstroke of color next to the other. He is really learning how to analyze the way light works and how to capture that on his canvas.”

Rice and the MFAH are offering two courses about the exhibition through the Glasscock School of Continuing Education, both of which are already full.

“Of course we hope a lot of young people come to see it because this is the kind of show that can strike a chord and really inspire somebody to go into art or into art history or become a patron later on in life,” Aurisch said.

Rice students can receive one of the timed-entry tickets for the exhibition free with the Passport to Houston.

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