Collecting as a Mirror of Time

Impressionism is particularly well represented in US museum collections. Through an unusual art exhibition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attempts to decipher the reasons for this using its own collection. At the same time, the investigation by the museum, founded in 1961, shows how museum collections are generally structured and how trends and changing tastes have influenced the collection of Impressionist paintings over the decades. Donations of works by famous painters such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) from the private collections of Hollywood personalities shaped the trends, as did purchases of American Impressionist works with a focus on California. The exhibition Collecting Impressionism at LACMA opens on December 21, 2025 in Los Angeles and is on view for more than a year until January 3, 2027.

Among the first painters of American Impressionism were Theodore Robinson (1852–1896) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), who had traveled to France. In 1877, Cassatt was even the only American woman to participate in an exhibition of French Impressionists. Both European and American Impressionism focused on landscape depictions. One major difference is that European Impressionism tended to depict people from the lower social classes, while American Impressionism mainly depicted the upper classes.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the western United States. The collection comprises over 150,000 art objects from the last 6,000 years. The museum primarily presents artworks from new and unexpected perspectives and interprets them against the backdrop of the region's rich cultural heritage and diverse population.