The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will exhibit the most beautiful 19th-century French masterpieces from its permanent collection in Berlin. Around 150 works by the finest artists of the day - paintings of Ingres, Corot, Courbet, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard and Matisse as well as sculptures of Rodin, Degas and Maillol - will be on display from June 1st to October 7th 2007, exclusively at the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) in Berlin. Due to the renovation and extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 19th-century galleries, these seminal works of art that rarely, or never, leave New York can now be marvelled at in Europe.
»...capturing the fleeting moment becomes the hallmark of Impressionism which characterises 19th-century art.«
19th-century art is marked by a deep transformation in the representation of visible reality: Realism responds to Romanticism and the significance of the artist's individuality increasingly receives attention: capturing the fleeting moment becomes the hallmark of Impressionism which characterises 19th-century art. France was the undisputed centre of artistic development in the 19th century and the creations of that time would lay the foundations of modernity as it was dawning before the turn of the century.
Monumental highlights of this epoch, such as Ingres' “Odalisque in Grisaille”, Courbet's “Woman with a Parrot”, Manet's “Boating”, Degas' “The Dance Class”, Monet's “La Grenouillère”, Gauguin's “Ia Orana Maria” and Rodin's touching sculpture “The Burghers of Calais” will be brought together for the first time in this exhibition in Berlin.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art boasts the largest and most significant permanent collection of 19th-century French art alongside the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. In this exhibition, the wide spectrum of the period's artefacts reveals itself to our visitors in all its splendid diversity, unparalleled by any other museum across Germany. For this limited period of time, the exhibition will provide a stellar complement to the magnificent Alte Nationalgalerie's (Old National Gallery) permanent collection containing German art of the same epoch, thus melting into a cohesive panorama of this great era of novelty and transformation.
