Impressionist art tour through France and the US to commemorate 150 years

The world’s leading Impressionist art museum will send an unprecedented number of its masterpieces on tour in France and the United States to commemorate the movement’s 150th anniversary, it announced Tuesday.

Impressionism was born in April 1874, when a group of painters, among whom were Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir y Paul Cezannetired of being rejected by the government-backed Paris Salon, organized their own independent exhibition.

The Musée d’Orsay, which today houses the largest Impressionist collection in the world, will send 178 of its 400 key works on a “Tour de France,” distributing them to 34 museums in early 2024. It will also organize an exhibition from March to August, at the which will bring together many of the works from the first exhibition of 1874, along with more traditional works favored by the Salon to show the contrast with the revolutionary Impressionists.

The exhibition will then travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from September 8 to January 19, 2025. Among the works on display are Print, rising sun of Monetfrom 1872. It was an art critic’s sarcastic response to the painting that gave the movement its name.

As is increasingly common in large exhibitions, there will be a virtual reality segment that will immerse visitors in the Paris of that time and allow them to experience what that first pioneering exhibition was like.

Fuente: AFP