Impressionist & Masters at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

Monday, 17 December 2007 21:41

Colorado Springs, CO - Highlights of more than 300 years of art history are on view in "Impressionist and Masters from the New Orleans Museum of Art," a new traveling exhibition running through March 9 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

It contains more than 85 major and not-quite-so-major works by famous and lesser- known artists, ranging from Luca Giordano and Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun to Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Highlights include Giovanni Martinelli's "Death Comes to the Banquet Table" (ca. 1630), Claude Monet's "Snow at Giverny" (1893) and Georges Braque's "Landscape at L'Estaque" (1906).

The large-scale show handsomely shows off the museum's 18-foot-tall special-exhibition galleries, or is it the other way around? The spaces have been adorned with molding and painted deep, rich colors to complement the selections.

The traveling exhibition was organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a way to supplement the battered finances of the museum, which was forced to close for six months and lay off 85 percent of its staff.

The Fine Arts Center's new museum addition, designed by nationally recognized architect David Owen Tryba, complements and enhances the original structure designed by New Mexican architect John Gaw Meem in 1936. The addition features nine permanent collection galleries, two traveling exhibition galleries, and an unprecedented tactile gallery. The expanded 132,286 square-foot facility will host major international traveling and changing exhibitions and feature works from the Center’s significant permanent collection.

Visit Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at : www.csfineartscenter.org/