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17/6/2004

Two exhibitions

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Seascapes of Edouard Manet

First survey of seascapes by Manet and Impressionists on show at the Van Gogh Museum
Many masterpieces from international collections presented for the first time in the Netherlands

From 18 June 2004 the Van Gogh Museum will present a major exhibition devoted to the seascapes of Edouard Manet (1832-1883). This is the first time Manet has been presented as a painter of marines. During the course of his career he painted around forty sea views (about a tenth of his total painted oeuvre), and a selection of around thirty of these will be on show. His artistic development as a marine painter is also presented in the wider context of sea paintings made by his predecessors, including Gustave Courbet, and contemporaries such as James McNeill Whistler, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir. Special attention is paid to the inspirational dialogue between Manet and Claude Monet as painters of the sea. The organisers have brought together a number of important works from various American and European public and private collections. Most of these have never before been shown in the Netherlands.

Edouard Manet has often been described as the father of Impressionism. Unlike Monet and the Impressionists, he disliked the countryside and only rarely painted landscapes. Much of Manet's work centred upon life in the modern city and his evocations of the salons, cafes, and boulevards of Paris, painted in a radical, direct style, caused a sensation in his own day. Yet for a fervent urbanite, Manet had a great knowledge and love of the sea. This resulted in a range of extraordinary pictures which up to now, have never been studied together as a group. The international show Edouard Manet: Impressions of the sea examines Manet's fascination with the sea and his innovative contribution to the genre.

Manet's first major seascape was inspired by reports of a historic episode in the American Civil War that occurred off the northwest coast of Normandy, near Cherbourg in 1864. The dramatic portrayal of The Battle of the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama (1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art) depicts the sinking of an infamous privateer of the Southern Confederate states, the Alabama, by the Kearsarge, sailing under the Union flag (the Northern states). Although Manet had not witnessed the battle he was able to recreate the scene in his Paris studio from newspaper articles and illustrations.

Manet's painting of this naval battle was followed by a whole sequence of views of ports and harbours. The artist regularly holidayed on the French coast, from Boulogne and Berck in the north to Bordeaux and Arcachon in the southwest. On his travels he invariably made sketches and studies that he subsequently embellished in his studio at home. Harbours, seaside resorts and accompanying commercial and social activities were the principal inspiration for his marine paintings.

As a group, Manet's seascapes show that in addition to being well versed in the traditions of marine painting going back to the 17th century, he was also familiar with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as Courbet, Jongkind and Eugène Boudin. Yet Manet's depictions of the sea and associated subjects are remarkable for their innovative approach. By adopting unusual perspectives, surprising arrangements and using a limited range of colours, Manet rendered his subjects in a uniquely fresh and modern manner.

A key part of the exhibition focuses on the artistic exchange between Manet and the younger Monet. Their relationship was to have a crucial impact on the history of Impressionism. Thus Manet's technical innovations and revolutionary approach were an example and an inspiration to Monet, as is evident in the latter's small, but remarkable painting The Green Wave (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) of 1866-67. Monet adapts the dramatic brushwork and vivid colour of Manet to evoke the excitement of boats speeding through a heavy swell. The exhibition also includes one of the most famous masterpieces of early Impressionism, the spectacular canvas Garden at Sainte-Adresse (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1867). Many of the most startling features of this work including the high horizon, the flattening of space and the rendering of the boats and the sea, seem to stem directly from Manet's marine paintings.

In turn, the work of Monet encouraged Manet to experiment further with new techniques and with painting outdoors. A striking example is On the Beach - Suzanne and Eugène Manet at Berck (Musée d'Orsay, 1873), in which the artist's wife and brother are shown lying on the beach. Grains of sand on the canvas suggest that this was painted on the spot, perhaps in imitation of Monet's open-air studies.

In his last paintings of the sea, Manet was again inspired by a contemporary incident, the dramatic escape of the radical journalist Henri Rochefort from the French penal colony on New Caledonia in the South Pacific. He produced two paintings of this subject. In both works the action takes place at night and the scene is cast in a cold, dim light, with flashes of creamy surf picked out against dark, translucent greens and greys. The bold handling invites comparison with contemporary sea paintings by Monet or Renoir but ultimately, this is Manet's unique combination of Impressionism with his own, characteristic and expressive style.

The exhibition was jointly organised with The Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (until 30 May 2004). Edouard Manet: Impressions of the sea is on show at the Van Gogh Museum from 18 June to 26 September 2004. The installation is by a leading Dutch designer Wim Crouwel. For the duration of the exhibition the admission price to the museum will be euro 12.50. Throughout Edouard Manet a combined audiotour is available in English for the permanent collection and exhibition at the special reduced price of euro 1.50.

Catalogue and guide
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue entitled Manet and the Sea, with essays by Juliet Wilson-Bareau, David Degener, Joseph J. Rishel and John Leighton, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 260 pages, 110 colour and 70 b/w illustrations, published in English only, paperback, hardback, euro 69.50 (available in Dutch bookshops). The Van Gogh Museum (in collaboration with Tijdsbeeld, Ghent) is also publishing a guide in four languages (English, Dutch, French and German), with text by museum director John Leighton, 80 pages, 64 colour illustrations, euro 10 at the museum and online, elsewhere euro 13.

In the image: 'On the beach, Suzanne and Eugene Manet at Berck'


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Van Gogh and the sea
Presentation of Van Gogh and the sea alongside Manet's sea paintings

Concurrent with the major summer exhibition of marines by Edouard Manet (18 June to 26 September 2004) the Van Gogh Museum will present a display on the theme of Van Gogh and the sea. The presentation features a selection of works made by the artist on the English coast at Ramsgate, at Scheveningen in Holland and at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Saint-Rémy in the south of France in 1888. The sea was a recurring theme in Van Gogh's oeuvre. The works shown here are from the museum's own collection, together with a number of loans.

Several drawings and sketches in letters from the time Van Gogh spent in The Hague (1881-1883) show the beach and village of Scheveningen, as well as portraits of fishermen. He was apparently less interested in the cosmopolitan entertainments of the up-and-coming seaside resort, than in the life and work of the fishing village. Here Van Gogh followed the best traditions of the Dutch masters of the Hague School, such as Hendrik Willem Mesdag and Jozef Israëls.

The presentation focuses on three paintings - one on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum - which Van Gogh painted at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the south of France. For many years Van Gogh had longed to see the Mediterranean and a few months after arriving at Arles in February 1888 he made an excursion to this picturesque fishing village. His brief trip to the coast provided a new creative impulse; he was fascinated by the bright southern colours and was all the more convinced that it was 'the light' which he needed to paint. 'Now that I have seen the sea here, I am absolutely convinced of the importance of staying in the Midi [...] I am convinced that I shall set my individuality free simply by staying on here', he wrote to his brother Theo around 5 June 1888 [623/500].

The painting La Berceuse is also linked to Van Gogh's marine theme. He suggested that this picture, a portrait of Madame Roulin holding a cradle cord, would look good on the cabin wall of a fishing boat, where it might soothe the lonely hearts of the sailors, bringing back 'childhood memories of being rocked in their cots'.

Various Japanese prints will also be on show, as well as British and French magazine illustrations of the sea and fishing village life. The prints and illustrations are from Van Gogh's own collection and represent a major source of inspiration in his oeuvre.



Van Gogh Museum
Paulus Potterstraat, 7 1070 AJ
Amsterdam

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