In 1956, Wayne Thiebaud was at the outset of his career as a painter, soaking up the artistic atmosphere in New York while on a sabbatical from teaching at the Sacramento Junior College, when Willem de Kooning offered him a sage piece of advice.

As painting arguably reached its evolutionary peaks across the middle third of the twentieth century, Chaïm Soutine, active during the twenties and thirties, was canonized as the patron saint of gestural figuration for his preternatural ability to, as sculptor Jacques Lipchitz noted, “translate life into paint, paint into life. He was one of the rare examples in our day of a painter who could make his pigments breathe light.

From the outside, as the exhibition title suggests, the concise and ambitious Artemisia: Heroine of Art—currently on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André, the palatial Parisian house museum—sits firmly within the former framework. Inside, however, the fight is on. 

In the first exhibition dedicated to Krohg outside Scandinavia, on view at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the curators seek to bring awareness to Krohg more broadly as an artist, and to situate him within the wider context of the established canon of nineteenth-century French painting.