Who: New Mexico Museum of Art
What: American Impressionism: Paintings From The Phillips Collection
When: June 5 - September 13, 2009
Where: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe’s Plaza at 107 West Palace Avenue
Contact: (505) 476-5072, www.nmartmuseum.org

Works by Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Augustus Vincent Tack, and John Henry Twachtman, are among other American Masters who compose some of this exhibition’s highlights. These artists’ works were among the earliest acquisitions of The Phillips Collection, established in 1921 as America’s first museum of modern art. The exhibition opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art on June 5, 2009 and runs through September 13, 2009.

The artists represented in this exhibition were among the first generation of American painters to absorb the technique, brighter palette, and subject matter of impressionism from their French counterparts. These artists, considered rebellious in their time, painted atmospheric landscapes, park, and beach scenes, urban views, and charming interiors, with particular interest in optical effects, light, and the different seasons.

American Impressionism was a painting style imported into this country after the 1880s by artists who studied in France and by American collectors who developed a taste for this new style of painting. American Impressionists tended to retain more academic influences such as structure and realism in their work than the French; however both favored bucolic outdoor scenes with light being the real subject matter. American Impressionists also differed from their French counterparts by imbuing their work with larger ideas related to the emotional and spiritual character of the landscape.

The sixty-five works represented in this exhibition range from some of American Impressionism’s earliest practitioners such as George Inness in the late 1880s to the nearly the end of the movement with work by Robert Spencer in 1931 and from artists both better-known to those less so.

A change in the times and the tastes of collectors may have marked the end of Impressionism as a formal movement in America, but its loose brushwork, two-dimensional surface painting defined by pattern and the treatment of paint, and its bright colors opened the doors to modern art.

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