VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) presents the exhibition Intimate Settings and Public Spaces: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings and Prints, on view Sunday, October 10, 2010 - Monday, January 17, 2011 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building.

Born into a new age of urban culture, social mobility, and leisure, the Impressionists captured the era´s rampant prosperity and social change in images of places they inhabited. This exhibition of some 60 works on paper looks at those spaces—both public and private—and the various artistic methods the artists used to captivate their modern world.

The public spaces range from fashionable boulevards, avenues, and parks to café concerts, theaters, bars, and racetracks. While they looked at their changing world, the Impressionists also turned inward for inspiration, utilizing friends and family as models set within their immediate surroundings. Glimpses of intimate settings reveal daily domestic pastimes: housework and childcare, bedrooms and boudoirs, entertaining and etiquette.

The Post-Impressionist artists, working mainly from the 1880s onward, continued to draw from the same subject matter as the Impressionists but developed different precepts for the use of color, pattern, form, and line. Intimate Settings and Public Spaces: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings and Prints features work by artists including Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Jules Chéret, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Félix Emile-Jean Vallotton, and Édouard Vuillard.

Paintings have been of primary use in the discussion on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist imagery, based on the interest in visible brush strokes and emphasis on light and color. Yet works on paper—using a diversity of media from chalk, graphite, pastel, and watercolor to etchings and lithographs—also demonstrate both groups´ interest in capturing private and public spaces.

Pictured: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, 1891, 98.304, The MFAH, gift of Audrey Jones Beck.