The Museum Folkwang in Essen presents Images of a Capital: The Impressionists in Paris open October 2, 2010 to 30 January, 2011.
After 1860 Paris became the capital of the modern world. The revolution in visual arts occurred there. Right up to this day the city is regarded as the basis of modern artistic achievements. The Impressionists developed new artistic techniques in order to depict the specific atmosphere of the industrial metropolis, with its speed and change, leisure and diversion, anonymity and communication, ballet and theatre, distance and seduction. The pictures of the city by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro or Paul Signac, pictures of boulevards, stations, parks and cafes, theatres and squares, the Seine and the suburbs, focus on Paris the metropolis and its diverse manifestations.
The exhibition is set up to follow the path of a Flaneur wandering through Paris. On display will be about 80 masterpieces of the most famous impressionists, such as Manet, Pissarro Monet and Degas, their most important contemporaries, such as Caillebotte, Luce and De Nittis and about 120 photographs (Gustave le Gray, Edouard Baldus, Charles Marville, Louis-Emile Durandelle, Henri Rivière, Eugène Atget) from the period, allowing a different view of the first modern Metropolis.
The exhibition is under the patronage of Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and the President of the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy.
It is presented in proven partnership with E.ON Ruhrgas AG. With exceptional loans from Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The exhibition is curated by Françoise Cachin, founding director of the Musée d’Orsay from 1986 to 1994, and from 1994 to 2001 director of the Musées de France. Responsible for the photography section are Françoise Reynaud, curator for photography at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, and Virginie Chardin, freelance curator.
Image: Gustave Caillebotte Paris Street, Rainy Da Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877 The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago, 2010
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