{"id":260849,"date":"2026-08-07T06:48:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T06:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/260849\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T06:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T06:48:11","slug":"frick-pittsburgh-adds-3-claude-monet-paintings-to-french-moderns-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/260849\/","title":{"rendered":"Frick Pittsburgh adds 3 Claude Monet paintings to \u2018French Moderns\u2019 exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Frick Pittsburgh Museums & Gardens has added three Claude Monet paintings to its exhibition \u201cFrench Moderns: Matisse, Renoir, Degas<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beginning Friday, the paintings will be on view inside the museum\u2019s Jacobean Gallery. The public will be able to visit the three Monets as part of the ticketed \u201cFrench Moderns\u201d exhibition, on view through Oct. 11.<\/p>\n

The newly added paintings include Claude Monet\u2019s \u201cBanks of the Seine at Lavacourt,\u201d \u201cRising Tide at Pourville\u201d and \u201cHouses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Due to what the museum described as a \u201ctravel coincidence,\u201d the Frick Pittsburgh was given the opportunity to display the Monets \u2014 one of which is part of its in-house collection \u2014 as they returned to the East Coast. The paintings arrived in Pittsburgh after being featured at the \u201cMonet and Venice\u201d exhibition, which ran at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrench Moderns,\u201d which opened at the Frick Pittsburgh in June, features 56 artworks highlighting France as an artistic hub from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries across multiple avant-garde movements, including Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. The touring exhibition was curated by the Brooklyn Museum<\/a> from its collection.<\/p>\n

The addition of the Monets lets visitors see not only the artist\u2019s evolution, but also why Impressionism once looked revolutionary, said Dawn Brean, chief curator and director of collections at The Frick Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n

\u201cMonet is on every umbrella, mousepad, T-shirt and pencil,\u201d Brean said. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to forget just how radical the (Impressionists) were in their particular moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three paintings span nearly 25 years, from 1879 to 1903, tracing Monet\u2019s career from years of financial uncertainty and critical skepticism to international acclaim. But throughout them all, Brean said, runs the same obsession: light and atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can you depict that with paint on a canvas? How can you evoke a time of day, a sense of the color just through brushstrokes?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

Painted with quick, visible brushstrokes and focused on ordinary landscapes rather than history or mythology, Impressionist works challenged the \u201cacademic\u201d painting that dominated the late 19th century. At the time, they sparked debate about which subjects were worthy of art.<\/p>\n

Monet\u2019s \u201cBanks<\/a> of the Seine at <\/a>Lavacourt<\/a>\u201d (1879) depicts a view of the Seine northwest of Paris. To modern viewers, it might register as little more than a pleasant landscape.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there is such skill and inquiry, belied by what seems like an easy technique and process,\u201d Brean said. \u201cIt\u2019s not as easy as it looks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting also has a direct connection to Pittsburgh. After appearing in the Carnegie International in 1901, the painting was purchased by Henry Clay Frick. Like all three of the paintings on view, it reached the United States courtesy of French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose support of Monet and other Impressionists kept them financially afloat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a minor miracle they didn\u2019t go into bankruptcy and their names are not obliterated from history,\u201d Brean said.<\/p>\n

In the museum\u2019s Jacobean Gallery, \u201cBanks of the Seine\u201d appears on a mauve wall, pulling in a color from Monet\u2019s paintings that might not seem as naturalistic.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there are so many different colors that make up how your eye perceives color and motion,\u201d Brean said.<\/p>\n

\u201cRising Tide at Pourville,\u201d painted in 1882 in a flattened, even disorienting perspective, shows a sea with cresting waves along the Normandy coast, set against an abandoned customhouse. Seen up close, Monet\u2019s brushstrokes and pigments are forcefully mixed together to produce a choppy effect.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I can hear this painting. I can feel the wind blowing all of the shrubs and sedges on the hillside,\u201d Brean said.<\/p>\n

Pittsburghers might feel a special affinity for Monet\u2019s \u201cHouses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect,\u201d due to an unexpected resemblance to PPG Place. But what fascinated Monet wasn\u2019t the architecture, but London\u2019s industrial haze, which presented a new challenge in capturing light and color. The painting is one in a series of 19 that Monet created from a vantage point at Saint Thomas\u2019s Hospital across the River Thames.<\/p>\n

In one corner of the painting depicting sunlight, thick ridges of paint rise off the canvas. The effect is created through impasto, a technique used heavily by the Impressionists that leaves each brushstroke visible \u2014 a quality critics of the day often dismissed as crude or slapdash.<\/p>\n

This visibility, perhaps more than anything, was scandalizing, Brean said.<\/p>\n

More than a century later, she believes that\u2019s still one of the revelations of standing before an original Monet: thick paint and brushstrokes that reveal the hand of the artist.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s not an illusion anymore,\u201d Brean said. \u201cAt its core, a painting is a handmade object by a maker. But that\u2019s too close to craft, and that\u2019s not how people in the 1800s were talking about painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

As familiar, even ubiquitous, as Monet\u2019s landscapes have become, Brean said, every work of modern art was once the art of its own moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou walk through and ask, \u2018But why is that modern? Why was that so radical?\u2019 \u201d Brean said. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to forget Monet was really pushing new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you go<\/p>\n

\u201cFrench Moderns: Matisse, Renoir, Degas\u201d<\/p>\n

Friday through Oct. 11<\/p>\n

The Frick Pittsburgh Museums & Gardens, 7227 Reynolds St., Point Breeze<\/p>\n

thefrickpittsburgh.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Frick Pittsburgh Museums & Gardens has added three Claude Monet paintings to its exhibition \u201cFrench Moderns: Matisse,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-260849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}