PASADENA, CA.- The Norton Simon Museum and the Musée d’Orsay announced an exchange of six paintings (three from each museum) in the spring of 2015 (March 27 – June 22, 2015), with simultaneous exhibitions in Pasadena and Paris. The exhibition held at the Simon will comprise Édouard Manet’s Emile Zola, 1868, James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871 (also known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother), and Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players, c. 1892–96. The exhibition at the Orsay will comprise Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Pont des Arts, Paris, 1867–68, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888, and Édouard Vuillard’s First Fruits, 1899. A small, bilingual publication with in-depth essays on the six paintings will accompany the installations.

"We are extremely honored to forge this special exchange with the esteemed Musée d’Orsay, the preeminent institution in the world for 19th- and early 20th-century art," says Norton Simon Museum President Walter W. Timoshuk. "Visitors to the Norton Simon will come face to face with three of the most beloved works from the Orsay’s peerless collection—in particular Whistler’s iconic portrait of his mother, which has visited Los Angeles only once before, very briefly, in the early 1930s. And we are delighted that this exchange will allow us to share with the Orsay’s visitors three highlights from our own 19th-century collection, works by Renoir, Van Gogh and Vuillard, that rarely leave Pasadena."

"The Norton Simon Museum is legendary as the repository for many masterpieces rarely shown outside Pasadena," says Guy Cogeval, President of the Orsay and Orangerie Museums. "The Musée d’Orsay visitors will therefore be given a unique occasion to make marvelous discoveries as some of these will be shown alongside a selection of paintings from its own collection. The First Fruit by Vuillard will be a climax, as it once belonged to Léon Blum, one of the great 20th-century French political leaders. I am delighted that in return Manet, Cézanne and above all Whistler, so much loved by the American public, should be loaned as ambassadors of the Musée d’Orsay in California."

The Norton Simon Museum Exhibition
Tête-à-Tête: Three Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay March 27 – June 22, 2015
This spring, the Norton Simon Museum presents an installation of three paintings from the Musée d’Orsay’s renowned collection of Impressionist art. Organized by Chief Curator Carol Togneri with Associate Curator Emily Beeny, the installation features Édouard Manet’s Emile Zola, 1868, James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871 (also known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother), and Paul Cézanne’s Card Players, 1892–96. The Orsay paintings will hang together in the Norton Simon Museum’s 19th-century wing, alongside paintings from the Simon collection by Manet, Cézanne and their peers. A series of lectures, tours, films, and family programs will be offered in conjunction with the installation. Timed tickets will be available for sale beginning in January 2015.

Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871
It is perhaps the single most recognizable image in the history of American painting: the spare interior of an artist’s studio, a gray wall, a Japanese curtain, an aging subject soberly dressed and seated in profile. Whistler’s portrait of his mother, painted in the fall of 1871, marks the high point of his career. ―It is rare,‖ wrote Whistler’s friend, the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, ―that one can judge an artist by a single work.‖ Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, also known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, is that single work. Endlessly reproduced, imitated and parodied, the picture nonetheless resists any fixed interpretation. Given the painting’s iconic status in American culture, the fact that Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 resides not in the United States but in France may come as a surprise. Acquired by the French state in 1891 after a vigorous campaign by admirers including the painter Claude Monet and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Arrangement hung first at the Louvre, and then moved to the Musée d’Orsay when it opened in 1986.

Manet’s Emile Zola, 1868
Like Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Manet’s portrait of Zola depicts a sitter intimately known to the artist. But while Whistler’s painting remains an ―arrangement‖ somewhat remote in its treatment of its subject, Manet’s portrait of Zola is literally overflowing with tokens of friendship. Zola was still making a name for himself as a journalist in 1866 when he published a glowing newspaper article on Manet. In his article, Zola praised the frank modernity of Manet’s style, which had made the painter a divisive figure—and, indeed, a frequent object of ridicule—on the Paris art scene. One year later, when jury members for the Paris World’s Fair deemed Manet’s submissions too radical, the painter erected a pavilion on the edge of the fairgrounds where visitors could judge his work for themselves. His co-conspirator in this guerilla exhibition was none other than Zola, who re-published his article as a booklet titled Une nouvelle manière en peinture (A New Manner in Painting) on the occasion. To show his gratitude, Manet painted the writer’s portrait in January 1868. Depicting Zola as a connoisseur and scholar, Manet surrounded him with both art (a Japanese print, an engraving after Velázquez and an etching of Manet’s own Olympia) and books (including, of course, Zola’s own Une nouvelle manière en peinture).

Cézanne’s The Card Players, c. 1892–96
Of the whole Impressionist group, Cézanne was the least understood by his contemporaries. Stung by the unusually harsh criticism that greeted his work at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, Cézanne effectively withdrew from public exhibition for nearly 20 years, reemerging in a series of shows mounted by the progressive dealer Ambroise Vollard, when Cézanne came to be appreciated at last as the father of modern art. After his withdrawal from the public eye, Cézanne began to spend more time in the South of France, on his family’s property outside of Aix. There he focused on local landscapes, kitchen still lifes and a narrow cast of domestic models. The Card Players, painted between about 1892 and 1896, belongs to this last category, representing two workers seated at a table playing cards. The deceptive simplicity of the scene, the pyramidal composition and the network of short, hatch-like brushstrokes are all characteristics of Cézanne’s mature style. The painting is the first of three versions of the same composition that Cézanne made in the early 1890s (the others belong to the Courtauld Institute in London and the Royal Family of Qatar). Cézanne’s sometimes agonized perfectionism drove him back to the same themes again and again, struggling to understand and convey not only what he saw but how he saw it.