Museum Talks | Washington, DC #19 The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – Impressionist and Postimpressionist Drawings

Villa Albertine DC is honored to host Theresa A. Cunningham and Sylvain Cordier for a virtual talk on the Impressionist and Postimpressionist Drawings exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This event will take place online on Monday, September 9, from 6:00pm to 7:00pm ET.

This conversation will be moderated by Faya Causey, former Head of Academic programs at the NGA, and will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

This virtual talk was recorded and published on the Embassy of France’s YouTube channel here.

You can watch the recording below:

Exhibition

The Impressionists, and later the Postimpressionists, were both lauded and criticized for their revolutionary painting techniques, yet these artists were equally groundbreaking in their radical drawing practices.

Experimental Lines: Impressionist and Postimpressionist Drawings from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon explores this revolutionary graphic innovation.

The exhibition begins with early 19th-century works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and others who laid the foundation against which the Impressionists reacted. On April 15, 1874, an exhibition by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers, etc., opened in Paris. This landmark event would become known as the First Impressionist Exhibition and introduced artists such as Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to broad audiences.

Drawings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and their colleagues highlight quintessential Impressionist subjects, including the landscape, modern life, and the racetrack, to consider the ways that artists working in France during the second half of the 19th century used drawing to articulate a new approach to depicting their environment. Drawing provided an opportunity to push the boundaries of traditional composition and use of color as well as to record ephemeral conditions of the landscape and scenes of modern life—concepts for which their paintings are well known, but which would not have been possible without these experiments on paper. In a rarely seen early drawing by Vincent van Gogh, the artist uses a series of repetitive marks and cross-hatching to suggest the effects of a gentle breeze on the marshy landscape near the Dutch village of Etten. These emotive lines prefigure the expressionism of Van Gogh’s later works.

Incorporating works in graphite, ink, pastel, and watercolor, the drawings in this exhibition range from quick sketches and preparatory images to finished, stand-alone compositions, which all present the innovative role drawing played in the Impressionist artistic process. This installation was curated by VMFA’s Theresa A. Cunningham, PhD, Assistant Curator of European Art and the Mellon Collections.

The Speakers

Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham, Assistant Curator of European Art and the Mellon Collections, joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2023. She received her BA from Boston College, an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University. A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, her writing has appeared in Print Quarterly, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Before coming to VMFA, she was Assistant Curator at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State.

Dr. Sylvain Cordier is the Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art. Born and raised in Paris, France, he received his PhD in Art History from the Paris-Sorbonne University in 2009. Originally a specialist of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century decorative arts, he has expanded research in the dialogue between decorative and visual arts, the relationship between artistic creation and discourses of power, and the art of portraiture in pre-contemporary Europe. Before joining VMFA, Cordier held several positions in academia and museums in Europe and North America. He began as a curatorial assistant at Musée Gustave Moreau and later assistant curator at the Castle of Versailles before becoming a lecturer at Sorbonne University. After completing his PhD, he was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2010-2011, he was granted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute. Cordier joined the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as a curator of early decorative arts in 2013. In Montreal, he co-curated Fabulous Fabergé, the local venue of VMFA’s traveling exhibition of the Pratt collection of Fabergé jewelry, and an exhibition focused on Rodin’s studio that was received by VMFA in 2015. He was the organizing curator of the critically acclaimed international exhibition Napoleon: The Imperial Household, which was presented at VMFA in 2018 under the title Napoleon. Power and Splendor. Cordier joined VMFA in November 2019.

About the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, is one of the largest comprehensive art museums in the United States. VMFA, which opened in 1936, is a state agency and privately endowed educational institution. Its purpose is to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art, and to encourage the study of the arts. Through the Office of Statewide Partnerships program, the museum offers curated exhibitions, arts-related audiovisual programs, symposia, lectures, conferences, and workshops by visual and performing artists. In addition to presenting a wide array of special exhibitions, the museum provides visitors with the opportunity to experience a global collection of art that spans more than 6,000 years. VMFA’s permanent holdings encompass nearly 50,000 artworks, including the largest public collection of Fabergé outside of Russia, the finest collection of Art Nouveau outside of Paris, and one of the nation’s finest collections of American art. VMFA is also home to important collections of Chinese art, English silver, and French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, British Sporting, and Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as renowned South Asian, Himalayan, and African art. In May 2010, VMFA opened the James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin Wing I after a transformative expansion, previously the largest in its history. A new expansion, the McGlothlin Wing II, is planned to open in 2028. Comprising more than 170,000 square feet, it will be the largest expansion in the museum’s history and will make VMFA the fifth largest art museum in the United States.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the only art museum in the United States open 365 days a year with free general admission. For additional information, call (804) 340-1400 or visit www.vmfa.museum.