For the duration of the festival (June 9 – 16, 2009), the AGA will offer free admission to seniors for the following exhibitions:

THE PAINTER AS PRINTMAKER: Impressionist Prints from the National Gallery of Canada
May 30–August 23, 2009

This exhibition features over 60 works drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, including Cézanne’s Self-Portrait, The Small Bathers and an important study for The Large Bathers. These prints were commissioned from the artist, but were also intended to gain a larger audience at a time when Cézanne was still relatively unknown. The Painter as Printmaker emphasizes the extraordinary beauty of the Impressionist print, and conveys how these artists were as revolutionary in their printmaking as they were in painting.

In turning to printmaking, the Impressionists continued an interest in the revival of the print medium that had begun with artists of the Barbizon school in previous decades. From the beginnings, printmakers were included in Impressionist exhibitions. The catalogue published to accompany the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 refers specifically to graveurs as members in addition to the painters and sculptors. In 1876, the influential art critic Edmond Duranty identified innovative print techniques as integral to the Impressionist aesthetic. Among the artists exhibiting prints in these first Impressionist exhibitions were: Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Marcellin Desboutin and Edgar Degas.

Other members of the group such as Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne also practiced printmaking. Renoir first encountered the medium as an illustrator for La vie moderne in the late 1870s and executed prints and counterproofs inspired by his paintings in the 1890s.After tentative attempts at etching in 1873, Paul Cézanne returned to printmaking in the 1890s when the art dealer Ambroise Vollard persuaded him to produce three lithographs for the Album d’estampes originales: The Large Bathers, Self-Portrait and The Small Bathers ( c.1896-1897), only the last of which was actually published in the album.

Organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada.

Tuesday Tours: June 9

A NEW LIGHT: Canadian Painting after Impressionism

May 30–August 23, 2009

“Our country is too young not to be attracted by novelty, but it has enough native good sense not to allow itself to be made a fool of, or to take the grin of a monkey for the smile of a woman.” – Edmond Dyonnet in The Year book of Canadian art (1912/1913)

It was 1913 when Edmond Dyonnet, secretary of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, wrote so disdainfully of the rapid changes seen in painting in France and other parts of Europe. For Dyonnet, Impressionist artists all qualified as “despisers of art” so opposed were they to the principles of the traditional Academy that he represented.

Contrary to Dyonnet’s views, Canadian artists such as James Wilson Morrice, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and A.Y. Jackson were more than simply “attracted by novelty.” In the late 19th century, these and other artists traveled to France to study, absorb and interpret the wealth of creative change occurring within that country. There they encountered the ideas of the American James Whistler and Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Mary Cassatt. French and English Canadian artists began to emphasize light over line in their paintings. They came to conceive of the artist as an Innovator whose role was not to offer an ordered and rational representation of the world, but to capture the artist’s sensation of that world.