NEW YORK, NY.- The Morgan Library & Museum is presenting Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift, celebrating the gift of more than 130 drawings and photographs from the collection of Morgan Trustee Karen B. Cohen. On view through October 22, 2023, the exhibition combines objects from Cohen’s generous gift with related examples from the Morgan’s collection. This selection of over seventy works on paper by French nineteenth-century artists explores pioneering approaches to the rural landscape and its inhabitants and helps to illuminate the role artists played in defining a modern relationship to nature.
The development of portable equipment, the expansion of the railway system, and the technical innovation of photography all helped reshape artists’ relationship with nature in the nineteenth century. As France continued to industrialize, artists sought out the country’s less-explored and richly varied landscapes, spurring the naturalist movement. Many artists left urban Paris and traveled south to the old-growth forest at Fontainebleau, where they established a creative colony in the neighboring town of Barbizon from which to foray into the wild. This exhibition asks how these painters, draftsmen, and photographers approached the traditional subject of landscape and scenes of rural life in new ways.
The exhibition follows artists from the city to the country, beginning with the rural village. To these artists, naturalism meant depicting not just the landscape but also those whose lives were intimately tied to it. A focus on rural laborers, and women in particular, led to some of the first empathetic—and least romanticized—depictions of the rural working class.
Steeped in the pictorial tradition of their predecessors, including the great seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artists Jacob van Ruisdael and Rembrandt, French artists reinvigorated the landscape genre with their commitment to naturalism. As an example, both painters and photographers created sensitive depictions of trees that are almost portraits. More broadly, they employed the pictorial device of a receding path to lead viewers into alluring landscapes without anecdotal additions.
Newly built railways brought artists and tourists alike to Fontainebleau. To escape the tourists and find unspoiled vistas, artists ventured deeper into the forest and also utilized innovations in portable equipment such as tubed oil paints and portable dark rooms. They captured the diverse landscape of Fontainebleau, from the old oak forests to the rocky gorges.
Aware of efforts to increase tourism to the forest and to harvest its resources, some artists sought to protect the wilderness in which they worked. They campaigned for its preservation, and part of the Fontainebleau forest was made an official nature preserve in 1861.
A principal aim of this exhibition is the opportunity to study drawings, photographs, and oil sketches side by side, and to consider the ways these artists achieved similarly evocative effects of light, air, and reflection using these different media and techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include drawings and paintings by Theodore Rousseau, Camille Corot, and Paul Huet, and photographs by Eugène Cuvelier and Charles Marville. Visitors can digitally page through a sketchbook by Charles François Daubigny in which he documents sites along his train journeys throughout France, as well as the excitement of this novel mode of travel.
Included in the exhibition are watercolors by George Sand, the masculine pen name adopted by female author Amantine Dupin. One of the most renowned writers in mid- nineteenth-century Europe, Sand addressed the plight of the rural laborer in her novels. In her surprisingly playful watercolors, she dripped pigment onto one sheet of paper before pressing and then removing another, leaving behind uniquely textured color fields that she turned into imagined landscapes, sometimes adding collaged plant elements.
A portrait of Sand is included among the photographs of literary and artistic personages that Cohen has generously donated to the Morgan. Cartes de visite, or photographic calling cards, were popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and their presentation in the gallery puts a face to the name for a number of the artists in the exhibition.
Karen B. Cohen built an impressive collection of work by artists active in France during the nineteenth century, which she acquired over many years with sustained focus and a spirit of intellectual curiosity. Her efforts resulted in a collection that reveals a web of connections between artists, locations, and themes across different media, including drawing, sketching in oils, and photography. While the Morgan’s collection includes many French works on paper, the Cohen gift also helps develop areas of the collection that were not as well represented, in part because of a previous policy that limited acquisitions to works made before 1820. Cohen’s transformative gift enables us to make new connections between the art and literature of that era, and to tell a fuller story about landscape as a subject. It contains 139 objects, comprising 42 drawings, 95 photographs, and 2 letters. The drawings and photographs are particularly strong in works associated with the Barbizon school and the forest of Fontainebleau.
Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, said, “We are deeply indebted to long-time Morgan Trustee Karen B. Cohen for this remarkable gift. Her collection enables us to tell a rich story of developments in French art and literature in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Her generosity and collecting acumen are unparalleled.”
The exhibition is curated by Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, and Elizabeth Eisenberg, Moore Curatorial Fellow, in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum.
