Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

F. Childe Hassam, Point Lobos, Carmel, 1914, LACMA, Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection American Art, 29.18.2

2024 marks 150 years since the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. The exhibition was infamously panned by art critics, but audiences took note that something exciting and remarkable was underway. American artists, too, were inspired by their intrepid French peers, seizing upon the opportunities that experimental painting provided them to express their thoughts and feelings about the quickly changing modern world. Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an exhibition that highlights seventeen paintings by some of the most esteemed Realists and Impressionists. The roster includes Americans active in Europe like Mary Cassatt in France, East Coast denizens like Childe Hassam and John Henry Twachtman, and Californians like William Wendt and Granville Redmond.

The UMFA presents this exhibition concurrently with Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography to draw attention to the cyclical dialogue between painting and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, photographers manipulated their images at various stages of production to imitate painterly effects, while painters worked and reworked their oils to imitate the immediacy of photography, demonstrating a remarkable reciprocity between these two art forms.