San Francisco: Birth of Impressionism

Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, includes approximately 100 paintings from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection and highlights the work of nearly 40 artists including Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh and Vuillard. The Musée d’Orsay is lending these works while it undergoes a partial closure for refurbishment and reinstallation in anticipation of its 25th anniversary in 2011. A second exhibition, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, will run from September 25 to January 18, 2011. The de Young is the only museum in the world to host both exhibitions.

“These two exhibitions present a rare and unique opportunity for Americans to see the evolution and incubation of the Impressionist style from the collection of the most important repository of French 19th- and early 20th-century art – the Musée d’Orsay,” says John E. Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “These exhibitions give us the opportunity to share with visitors some of the most seminal works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art that they would only be able to see in Paris or in an art history book, as the likelihood of them traveling en masse again is slim.”

May 22-September 6, 2010.

De Young Museum: Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA

415.750.3600.

Admission: $25 day of visit, $20 advance purchase; tickets include complimentary, same-day admission to Impressionist Paris exhibition at the Legion of Honor

website