Kunsthaus
Zürich
10 Nov. 2017–28 Jan. 2018
http://www.kunsthaus.ch/gefeiert-und-verspottet/?lan=en
‘In’ one day, ‘out’ the next: even in the 19th century, fashion was fickle. Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism were competing currents within French painting that were hailed by a small group of enthusiasts but dismissed by most critics.
The exhibition focuses on the years between 1820 and 1880. 1822 saw Delacroix’s first appearance at the Salon, the official exhibition platform for artists, at which he issued a challenge to Ingres and his fellow neoclassicists; 1880 marked the end of the Salon as a government-sponsored event. During this period Géricault, Corot, Daumier, Daubigny, Courbet, Manet, Pissarro and Monet also abandoned the approved academic and neoclassicist painting style of the era. Highly controversial in their lifetime, these artists are now celebrated worldwide as the ‘precursors of Modernism’.
Yet 19th-century French
painting offers a profusion of other equally important artists who, at
the time, enjoyed greater recognition and the plaudits of art critics
and audiences alike. Although indebted to traditional painting
techniques, artists such as Delaroche, Couture, Meissonier, Cabanel,
Gérôme and Bouguereau were themselves highly innovative. In the canon of
French painting from that period laid down in the German-speaking
countries at the start of the 20th century, however, these outstanding
figures came to be sidelined. Now the Kunsthaus sets out to rediscover
them.
The exhibition catalogue ( 248 pp.,
210 ill.), with contributions by Oskar Bätschmann, Sandra Gianfreda,
Marianne Koos, Matthias Krüger, Monika Leonhardt and James H. Rubin, is
published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich.
In addition to a detailed
introduction and brief biographies of the artists, it contains essays on
the art system of the time, history painting, the reception of Chardin
in still-life painting, and landscape painting.
Images 
Ernest Meissonier
Campaign of France, 1814, 1864, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, bequest of Alfred Chauchard, 1909
Henri Fantin-Latour
White Roses and Peaches, 1873, Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich
Camille Corot
Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Agnes Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund, 87.190
Gustave Courbet
The Source, 1862, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
Edouard Manet
The Swallows, 1873, Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich
Camille Pissarro
Banks of the Oise, Pontoise, 1877, Kunsthaus Zürich, Johanna and Walter L. Wolf Collection, 1984
