What to Expect at the Columbia Art Museum’s French Moderns Show | Arts and entertainment

For those who want to learn more about modern art, the latest blockbuster exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art offers an introduction of sorts. The current exhibition, entitled ‘French Moderns’, shows almost 60 works by artists who lived in Paris, the epicenter of Western art between 1850 and 1950. All the major art movements of that period, the so-called ‘isms’ of realism and impressionism to surrealism and symbolism, are represented in this important exhibition, which runs until January 5.

Although the show is organized not by movement, but by subject matter – landscape, figure study, still life, portraits – visitors can consider how artists approached each genre over time. For example, in the two galleries dedicated to landscape you can see how the visual representation of natural landscapes developed in the century that ushered in the modern era.

Let’s start with the first gallery. On the right wall is a seascape from 1869 by the realistic painter Gustave Courbet. This moody oil on canvas, entitled ‘The Wave’, perfectly reflects the artist’s own description of the churning surf as a ‘caged monster that would devour me’.

As they walk into the second gallery space, visitors are confronted with Claude Monet’s ‘Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect’, in which the impressionist master captures the smog-shrouded seat of the British government as if it were floating on the Thames, its waters enlivened by horizontal streaks of glittering gold.

In this way, an earlier, stricter representational style gives way to an approach that invites viewers to piece together an image with their own eyes from the colors applied to the canvas in interrupted brushstrokes.

On the wall, a few steps from Monet’s masterpiece, hangs another work that expresses a new artistic response to the landscape: ‘Jacob Struggles with the Angels’ by the French symbolist Odilon Redon.

A vertical sculpture nearly four feet tall, this oil on canvas depicts the trunks of two gigantic trees, between which the struggling figures are nearly obliterated in the morning light. More dominant than the biblical couple at the bottom of the image, then, is the miracle of dawn, which symbolizes the triumph of the human spirit.