SharedThought

I recently had a chance to visit the High Museum in Atlanta and visit their exhibit of French masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The exhibition surveys three centuries of French art, beginning with masterpieces by seventeenth-century artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, progressing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concluding with early modern works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Of the 76 masterworks on view, 52 are being shown in the United States for the first time. This was a nice show. The High Museum has a pretty plain permanent collection and relies on traveling exhibits, such as this one, to bring in visitors.
I saw the exhibit on Mother’s Day, so it was pretty crowded. As usual, the exhibit’s first rooms were bunched up. By the last room however, there was almost nobody around. The show covered a pretty wide range of time so there wasn’t much depth in any particular period. The fact that the exhibit was arranged chronologically worked out well for me. The earlier rooms devoted to French classicist works were crowded while the later rooms devoted to Impressionists and Modernists (my favorites) were not.

I came across an artist that I had not seen before. His name was Eugene Carriere. His painting called “Mother’s Kiss” was especially moving. Unfortunately, I can’t find any images of it to share.

Update! Here’s the painting:

I got it from the website of another Pushkin exhibit viewer who liked Carriere’s painting.

See the Atlanta Journal Constitution review of the show here. For a discussion of art check out this page before taking in your next exhibit.

The Pushkin Exhibit by SharedThought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2003 at 10:29 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.