Impressionists – 89.3 WFPL News Archive

A new exhibit of French Impressionist paintings opens tomorrow at Louisville’s Speed Art Musuem.

Renoir to Chagall: Paris and the Allure of Color features more than 80 works that capture the scenes and people of Paris during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Curator Ruth Cloudman says more than 50 of the works are on loan from the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis.

“One of my favorites is A Ballet Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper (1885) by Edgar Degas (below). I think it’s absolutely exquisite. It’s a pastel and he was a master of that very difficult medium. And it was done quite quickly. It was a sketch from life, but it was so exquisitely done,” she said.

Other works in the exhibit come from the Speed and from private collections in Kentucky.

Renoir to Chagall: Paris and the Allure of Color runs though May 6 at the Speed Art Museum.

(At top: The Joyous Festival (1906) by Gaston La Touche. Paintings are from the collecton of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN)

By Sheila Ash

A unique collection of Impressionist paintings is coming to Louisville’s Speed Art Museum.

The exhibit, called Impressionist Landscapes: Monet to Sargent, will feature more than 60 Impressionist paintings from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as some works from private Kentucky collections.

The paintings are by leading French and American artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Museum Director Charles Venable says there is also a special companion exhibit of photographs of Monet’s gardens.

“Generations passed and the garden kind of fell into ruin and then actually thanks in many ways to American philanthropists who raised some money gave it to the French state it was totally restored and Stephen Shore photographed as the garden basically came back into bloom after being restored,” he said.

Venable says the garden inspired many of Monet’s most famous paintings.

The exhibit begins February 4 and runs through May 22.