Breaking the Molds is devoted to prints and drawings by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Nabis and the Fauves, and the early 20th-century modernists, including workers in Abstract Art, Cubism, and Surrealism and including works by Pierre Bonnard, Felix Bracquemond, Charles Camoin, Eugene Carriere, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Henri Edmond Cross, Edgar Degas, Sonia Delaunay, Maurice Denis, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean-Louis Forain, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Marie Laurencin, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Berthe Morisot, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Georges Rouault, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice de Vlaminck, James A. McNeill Whistler, and others. The show will also feature drawings, gouaches, pastels, and watercolors by Andre Barbier, Henri- Edmond Cross, Lucien Coutaud, Leonor Fini, Jean-Louis Forain, Nataliya Goncharova, Eva Gonzales, Marie Laurencin, Maximilien Luce, and Georges Rouault and hand-colored prints by Mary Cassatt, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Mikhail Larionov, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Whistler and Renoir are probably the most represented artists, with large groupings by Berthe Morisot, Matisse (including a large full-face visage and 4 very beautiful early pochoirs), Chagall and Miró (including 5 original pochoirs from the 1930s and 5 hand-painted etchings from the 1940s), and smaller groupings by Edouard Manet (including his beautiful etching of Berthe Morisot in an early impression before cancellation), Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Picasso, Fernand Leger, Georges Rouault, and André Derain.

By the late 1860s, the art world had reached a kind of equilibrium between the Classicists (like Ingres), the Romantics (like Delacroix), and the Realists (like Corot). Students flocked to Paris to study with the masters at the schools, where they learned about drawing, color, and composition and mastered the kinds of subjects they would spend their lives working on. Each year at the annual Salon, artists would submit their works for judgment and the winners would receive medals and the commissions that would set their paths to success or keep them on it. Starting in the early 1870s, this well-regulated system began to fall apart, and over the next 60 years or so, the art world was completely transformed. The Impressionists, who were sometimes praised for their new ways of handling colors, were often mocked for their inability to draw. Their response was to start their own Salon, organized at first by Berthe Morisot, and seek their own audience among those willing to contemplate something off the beaten path. The Impressionists were followed by the Post-Impressionists, some like Seurat, Signac, Henri-Edmund Cross, trying to theorize new rules; some like Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cezanne, bringing a psychological violence to the canvas, trying to remake their viewers. They in turn were succeeded by the Nabis or Prophets, who offered up visions of a brave new world or a braver ancient one, visions of pastoral landscapes like Bonnard’s lithographs for Daphnis and Chloe or Ker-Xavier Roussel’s pastorals of a world in which satyrs and nymphs wandered about in landscapes not unlike those of the French countryside or Vuillard’s depictions of people living within the quiet harmony of well-ordered interiors within the private worlds of their homes or walking through gardens in public spaces open only to those who had escaped the bustle of a busy modern world. Rejecting harmony, the Symbolists began exploring the realities beneath the surface of things. Also rejecting harmony, according to their critics, were the Fauves, the wild beasts whose colors set the eye and mind at war with each other, revolutionaries like Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain, and by Rouault and Valadon, who did not exhibit with the Fauves, but whose works shared the violence of their coloristic vision. The advent of Cubism (here represented mostly by pochoirs by Fernand Léger and featuring a stunning watercolor by Nataliya Goncharova, whose paintings have begun breaking the $1,000,000 mark regularly with a high of almost $10,000,000) threw all artistic rules into question and the arrival of Surrealism (here in the person of early works by Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and Alberto Giacometti from the 1920s and ‘30s as well as a very surrealist watercolor by Lucien Coutaud and a dream vision Head of a Woman by Leonor Fini also done in watercolor) directly challenged the modes of thought and being (“I no longer think therefore I do not exist”?), completely rejecting the dominance of reason and logic of the waking world. Within the original prints and drawings of this show, we will present a visual tour of these many different ways of thinking about art and making art; where possible, especially in examples by Renoir, Morisot, and Cezanne, we will present several impressions of the same work to show how images change when an etching is printed over time and, in the case of Renoir and Rouault, variants of a work to show how artists can think their way through the process of moving from a first conception to a final one. We hope you will join us either in our gallery in Upton, itself a re-imagined exploration of visual space, or online, by browsing through the links (coming next week) on our website to the show.