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Classic French Modern, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

This conference paper presented at Art Without History symposium sponsored by the Oskar Reinhart Collection, September 2012, explores the development of modern house museums devoted to collections of 'classic French modern,' works primarily by the Post-Impressionist artists Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and van Gogh. These museums largely reflect the collecting activities of an international group of collectors that includes the Clark brothers, Duncan Phillips, Chester Dale, and Albert Barnes among the Americans, Samuel Courtauld in Britain, and the Swiss collectors Emil Bührle and Oscar Reinhart. The collections offer an alternative view of Post-Impressionism, one leading not toward the 20th-century avant-gardes, …