Fine Arts Center masters the Masters

If the sheer size of the Fine Arts Center expansion and its first post-expansion exhibit made a good impression, get ready to be really impressed.

Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Claude Lorrain: With its jaw-dropping, masterpiece-packed new exhibit “Impressionist and Modern Masters,” the Fine Arts Center solidifies its new position as a major player in the state’s art scene.

“This and the Weisman collection are exhibits like none we’ve ever done here,” said curator Blake Milteer, referring to the contemporary-art exhibit that highlighted the center’s August reopening. “It’s time to bring the world to Colorado Springs.”

Those who saw the Weisman show will find this exhibit of work from the New Orleans Museum of Art a sort of prequel.

“This show covers the first decades of the 1600s to the 1960s,” said Milteer. “It leaves off where the Weisman collection starts.”

The three-part show — mostly paintings, with a smattering of drawings and three-dimensional work — fills the center’s new second-story galleries with impressionism, expressionism, cubism and fauvism.

Seventeenth, 18th and early 19th centuries: “The real surprise will be in here,” said Milteer — only because the show’s publicity has stressed the later art. “These are the works the Iimpressionists were looking at. These are the subjects and the modes of depiction the Iimpressionists challenged.”

The work ranges from giants such as protean-landscape artist Claude Lorrain to relatively neglected figures such as Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun — whose monumental portrait of Marie Antoinette comes complete with its original frame — all the way to William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic contemporary of the impressionists.

“This is the art about which Picasso and Matisse said, ‘OK, I can do that, but there are more important things to be done,’” said Milteer.

The virtuosity is startling. Milteer points to Giovanni Martinelli’s “Death Comes to the Banquet Table,” with its range of textures ranging from faces to wine glasses to pies.

Impressionism: “This is the part people will fall in love with,” said Milteer of this section, which includes works by Mary Cassatt, Degas, Monet — whose “Houses on the Old Bridge at Vernon” is one of the exhibit’s signature images — Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and others.

Milteer views Iimpressionism not just as a major turning point in art, but as a reflection of important social changes.

“There were major changes in patronage and subject matter,” said Milteer. Before the impressionists, the time required to create a painting meant that nearly all of them were pre-commissioned; in contrast, the impressionists were painting first and then selling.

With objects merely suggested instead of explicitly rendered, “the impressionists start to have faith in the viewer,” said Milteer. “The definition of virtuosity changes.”

As an example, he calls attention to a Degas sketch, drawn in an impeccably conventional academic style, next to the artist’s much looser pastel, “Dancer in Green.” “He could do it,” said Milteer. “But it wasn’t his goal.”

20th century: Two world wars made Western culture itself suspect, said Milteer: “People like Picasso and Klee looked at the devastation and said, ‘This is what logic and rationality got us. It was time to go back and do a reappraisal.’”

Highlights here include works by Pierre Bonnard, Max Ernst, Joan Miró — whose “Portrait of a Young Woman” may be the most stunning bile-colored portrait ever painted — Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock.

Milteer described Picasso’s “Table with Bottle and Violin” — a deceptively simple line drawing with a piece of newspaper pasted on — as his favorite piece in the exhibition.

“It’s in pieces like this that you see Picasso and Braque developing the language of abstraction,” he said.

For viewers who want more depth, the exhibit includes an interpretive room featuring documentaries and a 1600-to-2005 timeline.

As good as the exhibition is, Milteer said it doesn’t shame the center’s holdings in the downstairs galleries.

“No matter what we do up here, I’ve found that people spend just as much time in the permanent collection,” he said.

Impressionist and Modern Masters from the New Orleans Museum of Art

When: Opening 5-8 p.m. Dec. 7; regular hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; through March 9

Where: Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.

Admission: Opening $10 members/$20 nonmembers; regular admission $6.75-$7.50 members, $10.50-$12 nonmembers, children 4 and younger free; 634-5583