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A selection of paintings and photographs devoted to the theme of winter opens May 8 at the Wildenstein Gallery, coinciding with Impressionists in Winter: Effets de neige, the Brooklyn Museum of Art's major summer exhibition. More than any other of the Impressionists, Claude Monet took delight in capturing the effects of snow, especially its light-reflective qualities and its capacity to intensify ambient color or suggest moods of solitude and quiet. Featured in the present exhibition is the painter's La Seine à Port-Villez, effet de neige dating from 1885, a recent discovery. Among other works to be shown are Seurat's sharply focused image of a dark figure silhouetted against the backdrop of a snowy street in Montmartre and a wintery landscape by Vlaminck, in which the experience of Fauvism is still vivid. In its spare use of color, Albert Marquet's frosty view of Crans-sur-Sierre is wonderfully evocative of snow-covered Alpine resort towns.
Photography played a significant role in inspiring French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters to add wintery scenes to their repertory of landscape motifs. Photographs by Eugène Cuvelier, a friend of Corot and Théodore Rousseau, may well have led Monet to paint snowscapes as early as 1865. The continuing appeal of winter scenes is also made evident by such examples of modern photography as Cottonwood Trees in Snow by Ansel Adams, Lincoln Park, Chicago by Harry Callahan, and View of Rennie Booher's House, Danville, Virginia by Emmet Gowin. These photographs are drawn from the collection of PaceWildensteinMcGill.
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