’09 Art show: big money, big Monet

By JEFFREY DAY - jday@thestate.com

The Columbia Museum of Art will bring in its most expensive exhibition ever next year, one featuring big names including Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh.

The museum is spending $500,000 on “Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales.”

The 47 paintings and six works on paper, done between 1850 and 1920, are being shown for the first time in the United States. The Columbia Museum of Art is the first stop on the tour. The works will be on display here for three months starting in March.

“It think we’re unique in having this kind of a show in South Carolina,” said Karen Brosius, museum director.

The museum already has raised about $485,000 for the show, mostly from individuals.

It will be marketed regionally and the museum staff expects it to break attendance records.

For the first time, the museum will raise admission prices for a special show. While “Turner to Cezanne” is up, the entrance fee will be $15. The usual fee is $5 for adults. Advance tickets will go on sale in January.

(Museum members will still get in free, and admission-by-donation days are planned. There will be no free-admission Saturdays.)

The big names alone wouldn’t make the show important, said museum chief curator Todd Herman. “These are excellent examples of major works by major artists. The (three) Monets, top to bottom, are terrific.”

Among the other artists whose works will be in the show are J.M.W. Turner, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice de Vlaminck, Edouard Manet, Jean- Francois Millet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

The works were collected between 1908 and 1923 by sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who were among the first British collectors to buy impressionist paintings. It was the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art in Great Britain.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the sisters donated 250 works to the National Museum Wales, which is a group of seven museums.

The show includes works that hold a place in art history. A full-length portrait by Renoir, “La Parisienne,” was shown in the first impressionist exhibition in 1874; the sole van Gogh painting in the show was done the week the artist died in 1890; an 1870 painting by Manet is described as his first impressionist work.

The atmospheric paintings of British artist J.M.W. Turner were a strong influence on artists like Monet, and several of his paintings from the 1840s are in the show.

Both Millet, who often depicted workers in fields, and Corot, who painted outdoors, also helped set the stage for the impressionists with their emphasis on nature and people rather than myth, religion and history.

The museum staff began considering the exhibition after hearing about it two years ago from the private New York company American Federation of the Arts, which organized it with the Wales museum.

“We all agreed it was a beautiful exhibition with key works,” Herman said. “It was very expensive, but we decided if we were going to do something, this is the one we can go for.”

The exhibition also will be shown at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, N.Y.; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Albuquerque Museum.

The Columbia museum’s most expensive show to date was an exhibition in 2000 of objects from a British royal house. It cost about $225,000.

“Turner to Cezanne” rental and organizational costs are $175,000; insurance and shipping are $185,000; and programming, marketing and installation costs are $150,000-$200,000.

The attendance record for a temporary exhibition at the museum was 26,000 during a 2006 Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition.

Reach Day at (803) 771-8518.