EAST LANSING, MI.- The Kresge Art Museum will present The Impressionist Era: Works on Paper, on view January 7 – March 16, 2008. Between 1874 and 1886, eight Impressionist exhibitions were held in Paris. The Impressionist Era: Works on Paper exhibit features 75 pieces by 33 artists, many of whom participated in the shows. Styles, subjects, and techniques are diverse, but collectively these artists possessed the willingness to experiment and question traditional aesthetic standards and art world practices. Many were mentors, friends, competitors, and followers. Some were forerunners of the Impressionist movement, revealing how the movement emerged out of established trends in the mid-19th century. Others were from the generation that followed, the 1890s, growing out of developments that paved the way for the avant-garde art.

The exhibition includes prints by Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Jean Baptiste Corot, among others. Edgar Degas' Dancers, Entrance on Stage, provides a rare Mid-Michigan opportunity to see one of his great pastel drawings.

In the late 1870s and 1880s, Impressionist printmakers favored the etching technique. A show of Japanese woodblock prints in 1890 fueled the growing interest in all things Japanese (called Japonisme),affecting the Parisian artists' techniques as well as compositions as they turned to color and lithography, made especially popular by Toulouse Lautrec. The explosion of interest in printmaking in the 1890s was furthered by several publishers who produced popular albums and journals.

Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and drawn from the Carnegie and Kresge collections, the exhibit is sponsored at MSU by the MSU Federal Credit Union, The College of Arts & Letters, and a grantfrom the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs. A signature event of MSU's Year of Arts and Culture.