Color and Light: The Neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross
The exhibition on the French Neo-Impressionist at the Museum Barberini was the first retrospective devoted to this artist at a German museum.
Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910) is one of the leading exponents of French Neo-Impressionism. With his friend and fellow painter Paul Signac, he discovered the Côte d’Azur for painting. Situated between the Impressionists around Claude Monet and the forerunners of Expressionism around Henri Matisse, his oeuvre marks a crucial step along the path toward establishing color as an autonomous pictorial means and, by extension, toward abstraction. He was celebrated early on as a pioneer of modernism in Germany.
In collaboration with the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny, the Museum Barberini presented the first retrospective devoted to Cross at a German museum. In addition to his prominent role within the Neo-Impressionist movement, the exhibition examined his influence on later developments within the French avant-garde, illuminating Cross’s significance as a major pioneer of twentieth-century painting.
© Helge Mundt
“Many of his paintings are either lost or in private collections. We are therefore thrilled to have won the support of so many private collectors. It is largely due to their generous support that we can present our public with a representative cross-section of Cross’s oeuvre, including many of his most ambitious Neo-Impressionist paintings.”
Helge Mundt
Henry Balaszeskul
Overall, the retrospective included around one hundred paintings, watercolors, and drawings from all phases of the artist’s career, including loans from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, as well as numerous works from international private collections, which are normally not accessible to the public.
Reviews
This retrospective exhibition traced the entire development of Cross’s artistic oeuvre and presented his innovative approach to color and light in context of the avant-garde of his time. An extensive educational program with tours, workshops, children’s art activities, films, lectures, and talks with Florian Illies and Lisa Zeitz, editor-in-chief of Weltkunst, accompanied the exhibition.
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