Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Their Friends from the Pola Museum of Art

Jan.16 (Sun), 2005 – Aug.28 (Sun), 2005

In 1874, an exhibition entitled Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. was held in the photographer Nadar’s studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris. This was a group exhibition requiring no screening and with no prizes held by avant-garde artists of the time. It later came to be referred to as the 1st Impressionist Group Exhibition. Thirty artists including Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne took part. This group exhibition was held altogether eight times until 1886. In the final show, the Pointillists Seurat and Signac and Symbolists such as Redon also joined.

This exhibition consisted of approximately 90 paintings, sculptures, and prints from our collection. By bringing the artists’ association with one another in those days to the surface, we hoped to be able to explore the era of Impressionism more in detail. To name some of the artists featured here, there was Manet, who played a significant role in the birth of the Impressionism; Monet and Sisley, who set up their easels next to each other along the Seine in their young days; Cézanne, who experimented with the formativeness in painting; Renoir, who was good at female portraits; Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, who depicted modern life with a sharp eye on the people and a superb ability to draw; Monet and the sculptor Rodin, who held a joint exhibition in 1889; Van Gogh and Gauguin, who, while being influenced by Impressionism, attained a pictorial world of their own; and Pissarro, who was the eldest artist to submit a neo-impressionist work of Pointillism to the 8th and final impressionist group exhibition together with the young Seurat and Signac.