Late Renoir and American Painting Exhibits at LACMA

Two exhibits at LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) February 28th through May 9th, 2010.

Renoir in the 20th Century

February 14–May 9, 2010

Renoir in the 20th Century focuses on the last three decades of Renoir’s career, when, following his rupture with impressionism, he turned to an art that was decorative, classical, and informed by a highly personal interpretation of the Great Tradition. Renoir’s paintings from this period, which have never been studied and shown as such, are often misunderstood as they do not fit comfortably into the history of high modernism. This exhibition is the first monographic study dedicated to Renoir since the comprehensive retrospective of 1985 at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and the first one ever mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Offering an unprecedented look at Renoir through the lens of modernism, the exhibition bridges the divide that exists in many people’s minds between art of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

February 28–May 23, 2010

From the colonial period to the present, Americans have been inventing characters and plots, settings and situations to give meaning to our everyday lives. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915includes seventy-five paintings, from before the Revolution to the start of World War I, that tell these stories in scenes of family life and courting, work and leisure, comic mishaps and disasters. These daily experiences were all subject to the artist’s searching and revealing eye and many of the works on view are famous images known to almost every American. Major artists such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley and George Caleb Bingham, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, are included in this important survey, the first of its kind in over thirty years.