DMA Exhibit Explores Impressionism’s Rebellious Origins

Dallas Museum of Art’s new exhibit, The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse, features work dating from 1870 to 1925.

Celebrating 150 years since the first Impressionist viewing, Avant-garde painters from Monet to Matisse will be on display as guests recognize the difference they made in European modernism. The exhibit opened Feb. 11 and will be available through Nov. 3. 

The gallery features Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and many others.

“In today’s art world, it’s difficult to imagine just how radical and innovative the Impressionists were,” said Andy Smith, Texas Instruments director of giving and volunteering and executive director of the TI Foundation. “But their artistic approach — a rejection of long-held styles and settings, replaced by new techniques, ideas, and subjects — helped pave the way for future artists to depict the world the way they interpret it. We are proud to sponsor this exhibition and hope it inspires those who view it to embrace their own unique ways of expressing themselves, just as the Impressionists did.” 

Exhibition curator Dr. Nicole Myers, who is also the DMA’s chief curatorial and research officer, says the exhibit invites viewers to reconsider the now-beloved artists as the scandalous renegades they were and their impact on 20th-century art.

“While the Impressionists are well known and widely popular today, many people will be surprised to learn that there was little appreciation or market for their work until well after their last group show in 1886,” Myers said. “Breaking with tradition in both how and what they painted, as well as how they showed their work, the Impressionists redefined what constituted cutting-edge contemporary art at great personal and financial risk.”