Monet and the Modern City

Claude Monet and his contemporaries responded to the urban industrial landscape through works that convey the power and promise of modernization. Monet and the Modern City explores the induring theme of inudstry in art, capturing the essence of the atmospheric conditions of the modern industrial environment that fascinated artists such as Monet, Camille Pisarro, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Félix Buhot, and Auguste Lepère. Pittsburgh’s own industrial aesthetic will be represented by works from the French printmaker Jean-Emile Laboureur’s Ten Etchings of Pittsburgh series and grandiose views of steel mills by Americans Aaron Gorson, Joseph Pennell, and Joseph Stella.

This exhibition will feature selections from Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process, an exhibition organized by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Carnegie Museum of Art’s own Waterloo Bridge painting is presented alongside two others from the series, thanks to the Memorial Art Gallery and Worcester Art Museum. Together, these works suggest the range of moods and colors that serial painting can produce.

Monet and the Modern City is organized by Akemi May, assistant curator of fine arts at CMOA. The exhibition Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process and accompanying catalogue and technology originated at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.