 drawings borrowed from public and private collections worldwide. Two of the three paintings from his "Bathers" series were on loan from the National Gallery in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the third canvas, belonging to the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., was not part of the exhibition. Although smaller shows mounted in the 1970s and ’80s explored specific aspects of Cézanne’s work, this was the largest show to allow a full study of his influence, genius, and evolution as an artist.
"Impressionism in Britain," an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and later mounted in Dublin, included more than 200 works by 100 artists and covered works painted in Britain by visiting French artists and Impressionist paintings created by British artists. Such French artists as Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille and Lucien Pissarro were represented. Works by English painters influenced by Impressionism formed a less coherent stylistic group. The works of Wilson Steer and Laura Knight were featured, along with a section devoted to American painter James McNeill Whistler and his followers.
An exhibition entitled "Landscapes of France: Impressionism and Its Rivals" was mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London and later traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The show illustrated styles ranging from the academic mode of the 1860s to the more abstract and colourful Pont-Aven school of the 1880s. Many of the works, which were on loan from French regional museums, showed the wide divergence between officially sanctioned art and that of the more avant garde. The Impressionists were represented by such artists as Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Monet, and eventually Cézanne.
A major Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago was the most comprehensive retrospective ever held of the artist’s work and drew record crowds to the museum during its stay (July 22-November 26). The assemblage included 161 masterpieces drawn from private and public collections around the globe.
One of the lesser-known Impressionists, Gustave Caillebotte, was the subject of a retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris, that was later shown at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition included a number of works from U.S. museums, including the 1877 "Paris Street: Rainy Day," owned by the Art Institute.
An exhibition devoted to the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir was seen in a number of Australian cities. The exhibit, which began in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, in mid-1994, traveled to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne before closing in early 1995 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. The works, which included 51 paintings and one sculpture, were part of European and American collections and covered most of the major aspects of the artist’s career. An Australian show comprising more than 150 works by Henri Matisse was on view at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and the National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition, which was on loan, included items drawn from collections throughout the world. It was the first antipodean show devoted to Matisse.
Whistler, who spent most of his life in England, was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the Tate late in 1994. The show, which encompassed the entire range of Whistler’s life and work--drawings in several different mediums, paintings, and examples of decorative schemes--was also mounted at the Orsay Museum in Paris and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Whistler’s famous portraits were well represented and familiar, but some of his later paintings, including some splendid examples of fireworks, were less well-known. One of these, "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling rocket," came under such harsh criticism by John Ruskin when it was first exhibited (1877) in London that Whistler filed and won a celebrated lawsuit for libel.
"Whistler and Japan," an exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., focused on Whistler’s works in the museum’s own collections and the Japanese influence on his work during the 1860s and ’70s.