MILWAUKEE — Impressionist and post-impressionist artists changed art history with their radical ideas of using freely brushed paint color that emphasized light and movement on common subjects, but a new exhibition is looking beyond the paintings and suggests that impressionists' drawings helped elevate the status of works on paper and influenced abstract expressionist artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
"The idea of the exhibition is to disabuse people of the notion, the myth, that they were (only) painting on canvas outside en plein air (in open air), when, in fact, they were also working on paper and pastel and in charcoal outside, and at a much earlier date than we had possibly imagined with their paintings," said Laurie Winters, director of exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which partnered with the Albertina in Vienna to organize "Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper."
The show, now on view, includes more than 100 drawings, watercolors and pastels by familiar artists such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh.
Forty-percent of the artwork shown in the eight famous impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 were drawings made with charcoal, conte crayon, gouache and pastel.
But art historians have not looked much beyond "the blockbuster mentality of impressionists in painting," Winters said.
"We've been so focused on that for the last 30 years that we have — I don't want to say intentionally — overlooked this material, but it hasn't been a priority," she said.
Guest curator and art historian Christopher Lloyd said he undertook a narrower look at the works on paper with an exhibition in the 1980s in Europe, but this exhibition is a fuller look at the subject and it's the first in the U.S.
The exhibit argues that the number of drawings in the impressionists' eight exhibitions demonstrates the artists' confidence in drawing, which implies the "need for a reassessment of the role of drawing in art of late-19th-century France as a whole," according to the catalog.
While the 18th century was considered the golden age in the art of drawing in France, it never received the attention or had the impact of paintings. Drawings were considered inferior because they were often made as part of a preparatory process.
Winters said the artists worked on paper with quick materials such as ink, pastels or pencils to express modern life, in ways they hadn't been able to before.
"I actually think — and this exhibition supports that — some of the most radical ideas about impressionism get born on paper as experiments before they are even tested on canvas," Winters said.
Lloyd said Degas' "Woman in a Tub," which was shown in the last exhibition in 1886, is a prime example of an artist taking the traditional medium of pastels and using it in a new way. They were used rapidly, not as they were in the labored portraits of the 18th century, and on a common person instead of aristocracy or the upper classes.
Also, instead of relying solely on paper, they produced alternative supports such as cardboard, canvas, linen and silk, he said.
Among the works featured are Paul Gauguin's two-sided traced monotype with watercolor on vellum called "L'Espirit veille" ("The Mind Watches") and van Gogh's "Landscape in Drenthe," where he uses pencil, ink, brush and transparent watercolor.
Several paintings serve as a familiar link and context for visitors, Lloyd said.
Included is Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect," which is owned by the Milwaukee museum and Renoir's "Bathers With Crab," which is on loan to from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The two museums bet on the outcome of the Super Bowl game earlier this year when the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers and the painting was the prize.
Winters said she hopes the exhibit changes the conversation about art history.
"The works have that degree of finish and kind of intensity and power so it's a whole new chapter I think and I see this as sort of the beginning of looking more seriously at how these great artists, who we thought we knew, are working on paper," she said.
Other artists featured include Camille Pissarro, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugene Boudin, Mary Cassatt and Jean-Louis Forain.
"We have many exhibitions with big names in it and many of them are going around the same loop over and over again," Lloyd said. "This is striking out in new directions. There's an heir of novelty, an aspect of surprise that the public will pick up and enjoy."
The exhibit runs through Jan. 8. It runs at the Albertina from Feb. 9 to May 13, 2012.