Sep.12 (Sat), 2009 – Mar.7 (Sun), 2010

Gardens and rooms are spaces closely related to our everyday lives. Both enjoy a long tradition as subjects for painting. With the rise of bourgeois society in nineteenth-century France, the painters associated with Impressionism often treated gardens and interiors as spaces reflecting the lives of their contemporaries. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, painters reexamined these motifs in depictions of their own every living environment, and they became important sites of artistic exploration. This tendency is exemplified by Claude Monet’s treatment of the gardens around his house at Giverny during his later years, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard’s intimate scenes of family and friends, and Henri Matisse’s constructions of uniquely decorative pictorial space based on his studio and female models. The everyday world represented by gardens and interiors became an important stage for the revolutionary developments of painting that took place between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

The collection of Western paintings in the Pola Museum of Art contains many examples of this trend in painting in which artists turned their gaze toward everyday life. Painters placed themselves in gardens and interiors, perceiving these spaces with their own eyes and creating a personal vision of the world. This exhibition presents the world they discovered, concentrating especially on the paintings of Bonnard and Matisse. By exploring the background and motivation behind their work, we hope that this exhibition will help viewers understand how these artists responded to their everyday environment and expressed it in their art.