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A Passion for Flowers: Painting in France from Courbet to Monet
Beginning May 28, 2009
A Passion for Flowers: Painting in France from Courbet to Monet will include approximately seventy-five masterworks by such celebrated artists as Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet. This selection of rich and visually stunning paintings that prominently feature flowers will demonstrate how the sudden availability of inexpensive flowers and flowering plants and the related explosion of popular interest in gardening and botany in France - known as the "great horticultural movement"- led to the ubiquitous presence of flowers in everyday French life and in art from the 1850s onwards.
The exhibition will be divided into three thematic
sections. The first will be devoted to still-life
paintings and interiors, showing how flowers,
textiles, wallpapers, and paintings with floral
motifs intermingled in domestic settings throughout
the nineteenth century. A second section will
feature scenes drawn from daily life and portraits,
illuminating complex issues such as gender roles and
the rise of the middle class in France. The third
and final section of the exhibition will feature
paintings of the orchards and flower gardens that
were a favorite subject for nineteenth-century
French painters. In the accompanying exhibition
catalogue Guest Curator Laura Coyle, former curator
at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, will expand on the
themes explored in the exhibition. A Passion for
Flowers will demonstrate how the culture of flowers
and representations relating to it resulted in the
extraordinary realist, impressionist, and
post-Impressionist works that make up the
exhibition.
This exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts.
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