An exhibit on display this summer at the Shelburne Museum highlights impressionist paintings from the museum’s collection. It’s called “In a New Light: French Impressionism Arrives in America.”
Thomas Denenberg, director of the Shelburne Museum, said the exhibit highlights the museum's impressive collection of French Impressionism. It tells the story of Claude Monet’s The Drawbridge, Amsterdam and how it became the first Monet painting brought to the United States. It was collected by the parents of Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havermayer Webb’s parents, Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer in the 1870s.
The Havemeyers bought the paintings directly from the artists’ studios when they were touring France, with their friend Mary Cassatt, the expatriate American artist. The paintings hung in the Havemeyer’s home on Park Avenue in New York City. When the Havemeyers died, the majority of their collection was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remains. Denenberg said it’s the collection of record of French Impressionism in the United States.
“What we have in Vermont at the Shelburne Museum are the 20 paintings that their daughter kept. So as I like to point out these are the cream of the crop of that collection. I always like to tell the staff at the Met that we have the best of the Havemeyer paintings and they have the rest,” Denenberg said.
“In a New Light” was a way of reinterpreting the paintings at the Shelburne Museum, but it’s also presented at the museum’s new Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, under state of the art LED lighting.
“Often these paintings are seen by Vermonters in the memorial building in a very unusual domestic setting. It’s actually very rare for people to see paintings like this as they do at Shelburne Museum. But we wanted people to be able to get up close to the paintings to understand the technique and understand that these are works of genius and these are part of our community and our patrimony as Vermonters.”
Le pont, Amsterdam
The painting depicts a drawbridge. “We think of impressionism as such a conservative way of seeing today, but in fact Monet and others were interested in technology. In this case we have very awkward looking girders suspended off of a classical arch over this very traditional looking bridge. But this is in fact a painting of modernity, and that’s what impressionism is, it’s about using new materials and new ways of seeing to celebrate all of these new advances in technology and urban life.”
Louisine Havemeyer and Her Daughter Electra
The pastel, by Mary Cassatt, features Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb as a little girl, around six-years-old, with her mother Louisine, done by Mary Cassatt. “[Cassatt] was a very close friend of these radical French painters, Claude Monet, [Edouard] Manet and others. This very loving portrait of a mother and daughter by a very important American/French artist is really the Rosetta Stone-like document. Louisine was a close friend and had been in school with Mary Cassatt. And therefore Cassatt became the tour guide to understanding what was an extremely avant guard movement in France, which was Impressionism,” Denenberg said. “Cassatt becomes the woman who takes the Havemeyers to artists’ studios and introduces them to this exciting new way of looking at the world. And it becomes an international way of seeing because of these paintings that we have here.”
The Grand Canal, Venice
“When we have visitors from Europe who see this painting they always assume it’s a poster. No one is willing to admit that it’s here,” Denenberg said. It’s a study of gondolier in a boat passing by painted poles, by Eduoard Manet. “What’s so important about this painting is the water, that it’s made up of just a series of these simple little brush strokes of blues and greens and a little bit of a sort of yellowish-white. The image of the gondolier sort of decays and then comes into focus as you look at it. In 1875, this is a sort of radical idea, the fact you can depict water in this way. You can depict what is obviously a scene that people would understand, the man paddling the gondola in Venice, which would be something that other artists were investigating at the time, but the way that the geometry of the background and the representation of the water is also very geometric that’s a new way of looking at the world and this is in a period where the perception of life speeding up is very real to people.”
By the way, the painting was at the center of a sort of international incident. The Musee d’Orsay in Paris had requested the painting for an exhibit, but Denenberg refused because they wanted it to stay in Shelburne for this exhibit. “The president of the Musee d’Orsay when to the press and called me a tete de mule, a mule head, for not lending it to them.” Denenberg said he wrote a very polite letter declining the request.
“What I like about that story is that in fact it’s so important to a museum in Paris that he would actually go to the papers and sort of complain about it. And that’s something that we need to understand, that there are other parts of the world where creative culture and the arts are actually worth making a fuss about, and that’s something we need to internalize more in this country.”
"In a New Light" is on display through September 1.
