Impressionist innovators like Monet and Renoir highlight DIA's 'Humble and Human' exhibit
The new Impressionist exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts is situated just steps from the Rivera Court — the museum's indisputable gem and bona fide attraction in the heart of the DIA.
That high-profile placement is deliberate. The DIA doesn’t want you to miss “Humble and Human: Impressionist Era Treasures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts, an Exhibition in Honor of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr.”
The name is a mouthful, but the narrative is easy to follow.
Spread across three galleries dedicated to European art, “Humble and Human” traces the origins of the Impressionist art movement from an 1845 painting by French painter Gustave Courbet through its heyday in the late 19th Century before exploring, in the final gallery, the era of post-impressionism where marquee artists like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne steal the show.
“I love being able to tell a story visually. That’s exactly what we try to do when we design an exhibition,” says Jill Shaw, the museum’s curator of European art (1850-1970), who worked on this exhibition.
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
Thanks to a financial gift from his namesake foundation, the exhibition is a belated 100th birthday gift of sorts to Wilson Jr., the late philanthropist and owner of the Buffalo Bills who passed away in 2014. (Before entering “Humble and Human,” a timeline of Wilson’s life greets visitors.) His foundation is in the process of bequeathing his philanthropic fortune to a wide variety of initiatives, many of them in Detroit.
More:Beautiful dilemma: Give $1.2B to worthy causes in 20 years or less
As an avid art enthusiast with a collection valued in the tens of millions, Wilson reportedly adored impressionist painters and owned works from two of the marquee artists in the exhibition — Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, who helped coin the term impressionism with his 1872 painting “Impression, soleil levant.”
Because Wilson split his time between Buffalo and Grosse Pointe Shores, “Humble and Human” pulls from the collections of the two major institutions in both regions — the DIA in Detroit and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery museum in Buffalo.
It might seem tame today, but “Humble and Human” is a journey through an era of artwork that was rebellious and groundbreaking for its time.
Impressionists stepped outside their doors and painted modern life and landscapes as they saw it. Instead of painting still lifes and landscapes inside of a sterile studio, painters like Monet wanted to capture natural transitions of life under natural light.
Critics thought of the works as incomplete sketches but audiences slowly fell in love with the movement.
While defined lines and contours dominated in the 19th Century, impressionists like Monet put a trace of emotion and passion in their work by leaving a mark with their brush strokes — a nod to dignifying and celebrating the hard work and simplicity of everyday life of ordinary people.
“Impressionists wanted to go outside and paint the life that was in front of them,” says Shaw. “You start seeing the paint being a true entity on the canvas itself.”
On a recent tour of the “Humble and Human,” Shaw highlighted five elements of the exhibition you don’t want to miss.
The early days of impressionism
The earliest painting in “Humble and Human” wasn’t painted by an artist who was considered an impressionist.
In many ways, however, he helped lay the groundwork for the art movement.
Courbet’s “Bather Sleeping by a Brook” looks tame and naturalistic — a nude model asleep by a stream — but Shaw says the work was quite avant-garde for its time.
“This was a nude in a landscape that was not an idealized nude — this was not a goddess from mythology,” says Shaw. “This was a real live person and this was scandalous at the time.”
Shaw says it shows a transition from the “finished, polished and photographic-style” of painting that people were accustomed to in the 19th Century.
“When the impressionists came on board, they wanted to break those rules,” says Shaw. “They did it by looking at artists like Courbet and Edouard Manet,” who is also featured in the exhibition.
You can’t have an impressionist exhibition without Claude Monet
Shaw says that’s partially because of the relentless marketing that Monet’s dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was responsible for.
“(Durand-Ruel) was very, very good at marketing Monet’s work early on,” says Shaw. “Americans were very captivated by the work.”
That doesn’t mean Monet was overrated.
In one of two works from Monet in “Humble and Human,” the French painter captures the fleeting transition of winter into spring with great beauty and style.
“What was so awesome about their practice was that they wanted to capture those fleeting moments of everyday life,” says Shaw, describing Monet’s “Chemin de halage à Argenteuil (Towpath at Argenteuil, Winter),” painted between 1875 and 1876.
“Monet was one of the best artists at capturing those fleeting moments — those transitions that are so hard to capture and paint.”
The lone female artist stands out
Out of all 44 artworks in the show, there’s only one painted by a woman.
Alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot was considered one of the “three great ladies” of the Impressionist art movement by French art historian Henri Focillon.
Morisot’s “Femme cousant (Woman Sewing)” from 1879 depicts a simple slice of life and labor that defined the era — an intimate scene of a woman immersed in sewing with some of her detailed fabric handiwork on display in the background.
Morisot is situated by a pair of works from two other icons of impressionism — Pierre Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas.
“I was excited to be able to contextualize her work and how strong it is in comparison to these other two male artists who, along with Claude Monet, really dominated the impressionists,” says Shaw.
The impressionist social scene
Impressionists captured natural city scenes as often as they did landscapes in transition and curator Shaw sought out to show two very different social gatherings back-to-back.
In Henri Gervex’s 1877 oil on canvas painting “Café Scene in Paris,” friends unwind with glasses of absinthe while reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes.
In James Joseph Tissot’s “L’Ambitieuse (Political Woman),” painted between 1883 and 1885, a woman navigates the sophisticated upper echelons of French life in a gorgeous pink gown at a ritzy party.
“We see the comparison between the common place and the fancy life,” says Shaw. “You really get the sense of the different aspects of life that these artists were interested in exploring.”
A new wave of artists rebel — just like the impressionists before them
In the third and final gallery, post-impressionism takes center stage. The room is filled with heavy hitters like Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gaugain and Vincent van Gogh.
These artists bucked the naturalism that dominated previous impressionist works in favor of boldly exploring line and form with the evidence of the brush stroke still intact and, in the case of van Gogh, even more aggressively textured than before.
“So many of the artists in this room were once impressionists, but they took lessons from impressionism and really pushed art forward,” says Shaw, describing them as risk takers and innovators rebelling against the artists who came before them.
“That’s the way life works,” says Shaw. “We push each other and that’s how creativity moves forward.”
The exhibit ends with van Gogh’s self-portrait from 1887 — the very first van Gogh to enter a public museum in the United States when the DIA purchased it in 1922.
It’s a teaser for a big van Gogh exhibition that’s coming to the museum next summer called “Van Gogh in America.”
'Humble and Human'
'Impressionist Era Treasures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts, an Exhibition in Honor of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr.
Open now through Oct. 13
Free with museum admission, which is free for members of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties