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MFA's 'Monet to Matisse' show to include a dozen masterworks

 
Auguste Renoir’s Figures on the Beach (1890, oil on canvas) celebrates the novelty of a day at the beach by a growing middle class in France.
Auguste Renoir’s Figures on the Beach (1890, oil on canvas) celebrates the novelty of a day at the beach by a growing middle class in France.
Published Sept. 20, 2014

ST. PETERSBURG — To celebrate its 50th anniversary, only the best will do for the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

Of the 25 or more works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and others coming to an impressive exhibit in February, at least a dozen are considered masterworks.

And there could be even more masterworks — meaning they are considered among the finest works by an artist — coming to "Monet to Matisse: On the French Coast," said Kent Lydecker, the museum's director. More artwork loans are still being negotiated.

Impressive, too, are the lending institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum and the Phillips Collection, which have some of the finest permanent collections in the United States and, in some cases, the world.

Because of the caliber of the art, it's going to be an expensive show to present.

Though museums rarely discuss specific costs, Lydecker said that an estimate in the mid six figures "was about right."

Two of the most intriguing pieces are by Picasso, painted in the 1930s. They are landscapes, not widely known (in part because they're coming from the private collection of his son, Claude Picasso) and depart from his usual subject, the human figure. Both are more straightforward and more gentle in their treatment than his aggressive, deconstructive style in portraiture. One, a sunny village of stacked houses in bright colors, was painted in 1937, the same year he created Guernica, his wrenching, monumental testament to the suffering and agonies of war.

Matisse, one of the names anchoring the show's title, is represented by a lovely portrait, Girl by a Window, of a young woman in a room with a view of the Mediterranean Sea, a work that creates multiple environments both interior and exterior. The hand of Renoir, the other anchor, is immediately recognizable in the soft, lush depiction of a day at the beach in Figures on the Beach.

These late 19th and early 20th century artists, mostly French, are associated with impressionism and other modern movements. Many national and international exhibitions have featured them, but the theme of this one, "On the French Coast," is one that Lydecker said "has never been done, to my knowledge."

While other shows have explored artists of that period working on France's Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts, none has pulled both of them together. For many years, the coasts were important ports for commercial purposes but didn't become popular destinations for a larger public until the 19th century, when railroad transportation became widespread and affordable for a growing middle class.

"The vacation was a bourgeois invention," Lydecker said, and for the French in general, "the coast became a place for relaxation, solace and inspiration." It also did for artists who, when they got out of the city, sometimes traded the bucolic countryside for the seaside. All the artists in this exhibition use the seaside in service to their own styles, from Alfred Stevens' finely crafted and psychologically nuanced 1893 portrait of an elegantly dressed woman walking on a beach, to Raoul Dufy's gestural treatment of the Marseilles harbor in strong colors painted in 1954, the year of Henri Matisse's death.

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The theme has a resonance beyond the obvious similarities of coastal geography in France and Florida. Florida, too, only became a popular destination for business and leisure after the railroads opened it up.

"Monet to Matisse" is the museum's major show in 2015, a showcase for its 50th anniversary, and the museum will publish a scholarly catalog to accompany it, another mark of the show's distinction.

"We want to celebrate what our community has done over the last 50 years," Lydecker said. As a "gesture of inclusion," on Feb. 7, the exhibition's opening day, the museum will not charge admission.

It's a nod to Feb. 7, 1965, when the museum opened at 255 Beach Drive NE, on the downtown waterfront where it stands today. Admission then was also free.

Contact Lennie Bennett at lbennett@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8293.