The Museum of Modern Art presents the second installment of ModernStarts in Places, an exhibition that demonstrates how particular spaces, both real and imagined, urban and rural, were conceived and represented by artists in the period between 1880 and 1920.
Places examines two major and interrelated themes in the visual arts of the time梠ne of escape from the here and now, whether to actual geographic sites, imaginary realms, or the domestic sphere; and one of embrace of the new modern city in all its complexities. The forty-year period addressed in Places divides roughly in half, as images of the country gave way, in large part, to images of the city. Yet, it is important to note that depictions of the country were shaped by urban viewpoints, while representations of the city were informed by the visual vocabulary of the past.
The growth of the modern vision in art involved a rediscovery of something that had always been there: the countryside of France, which painters, printmakers, and photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught themselves to see with new eyes. At a ime of bustling expansion in the country's cities and manufacturing towns, and of great strides in technology and industry, artists turned with fresh urgency to the traditional genre of landscape, which not only became invested with the vitality of the age but offered a strong alternative understanding of the place of human society in nature. As the focus of powerful intellectual and emotional energies, the land- scape image was a crucial site in the formation of modern art.
In French Landscape: The Modern Vision, 1880-1920, Magdalena Dabrowski explores the landscapes of the period as they are reflected in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. In geography, the book covers the ground from the cliffs of Normandy to the hills of Burgundy, from the Cote d'Azur to the Pyrenees and even beyond, to what was then the French protectorate of Morocco; the artists discussed here range from Cezanne in the 1880s to Mat isse nearly forty years later, including along the way Monet, Seurat, Degas, van Gogh, Picasso, and more--not to mention photographers such as Eugene Atget and Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Together the works in French Landscape provide a comprehensive view of this critical period and subject in modern art.
Preface & Acknowledgments
Introduction
Paris
Plates
Environs of Paris
Plates
Normandy, the Channel, and Brittany
Plates
Burgundy, or the Chte d'Or
Plates
The South of France
Plates
Landscapes Abroad
Plates
Bibliography
Index of Plates
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
