"Manet and the Sea" show in Philadelphia
Jack Linthicum
Manet and the Sea
February 15 - May 31, 2004
Tickets on sale now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or by calling
(215) 235-SHOW (7469). Online ticketing begins January 3, 2004.
This show will be the first to explore the marine paintings of Édouard
Manet and his contemporaries, including such Impressionists as Claude
Monet, Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, who were deeply influenced
by Manet's seascapes. When Manet first began painting seascapes in the
1860s, the tradition of marine painting in France was governed by
well-established conventions that had become stale and tired. Manet's
beautiful and challenging views of the sea created new interest in
this subject among the younger generation of painters.
While French Impressionist landscape painting is both popular and
well-studied, the numerous seascapes produced by Manet and his
Impressionist contemporaries have yet to receive the attention they
deserve. Because the sea is a natural force in a constant state of
flux, it offered Manet and his followers the perfect vehicle for
developing new painting techniques and compositions. In addition, the
social world of Manet's Paris was not absent from the seaside. Like
many Europeans of his era, Manet took numerous seaside holidays for
his health. He and his contemporaries recorded not only the sea and
its changing moods but also the many fashionable people who traveled
to the sea in search of an escape from city life.
Manet and the Sea brings together innovative and compelling works on
sea-related themes by a variety of artists with differing ambitions.
At the same time, it addresses emergent socio-historical phenomena,
such as tourism, that made marine subjects newly attractive to
vanguard artists in the second half of the 19th century.
The exhibition includes approximately one hundred objects--paintings,
watercolors, and drawings--from sixty public and private collections
in the United States and abroad.