Renoir, Monet, Gauguin? This title sounds like an exhibition you've seen countless times before. But the Museum Folkwang in Essen is offering a surprisingly new selection of works to celebrate its 100th anniversary: From February 06 to May 15, 2022, around 120 works from the Karl Ernst Osthaus Collection and from that of the Japanese artist Kōjirō Matsukata will be on view in Renoir, Monet, Gauguin. Images of a Flowing World. The latter is now being exhibited comprehensively in Europe for the first time since the 1950s. Osthaus and Matsukata are well-known collectors of the early 20th century, who made their collections publicly available to museums from the beginning in order to bring Impressionism to a wider public.
Since its emergence in the second half of the 19th century, French Impressionism has caused fascination, especially in Japan. Shortly before that, Japanese woodblock prints and paintings that focused on transience and the attitude to life of the new Japanese bourgeoisie became known in Europe. This genre is called ukiyo-e there (Engl. pictures of the floating world) and had a decisive influence on the development of Impressionism. The Impressionists collected by Matsukata include such greats as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin.
