Eugene Carriere: Symbols of Creation

May 8 – June 30, 1990

Kent Fine Art is Proud to present an exhibition of twenty paintings by Eugene Carrier, on of the leading 19th-century French Symbolist painters. Carriere was an intimate friend of Rodin, Gaugin, and Verlaine, and frequented the Symbolist literary circle. He shared his contemporaries' quest to evoke the nuanced, intangible world of spirit, in rejection of the absolute authority given external appearances by Realism and Impressionism.

Immensely successful in his day, Carriere showed regularly from 1880 at the annual Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francaises. At the same time Carriere began to receive honors at the Salon, he was welcomed into the brilliant literary and artistic avant-garde of Paris. In 1980 he joined Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, and others in founding the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and in 1903 he was a founding member of the Salon d'Automne. In addition to several important acquisitions and commissions, the French state awarded Carriere the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur in 1897.

After Carriere's death in 1906, his work was shown in numerous retrospectives in the first half of the century. In 1949 the Orangerie in Paris mounted a major exhibition, "Eugene Carriere and Symbolism: Exposition in Honor of the Centenary of the Birth of Eugene Carriere," which heralded the rebirth of interest in Symbolism and paid tribute to the importance and influence of Carriere's work in the context of his well-known contemporaries. While not widely known by the American public, Carriere's work is represented in museum collections throughout the world — twenty in the United States alone, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Kent Fine Art is pleased to announce the publication of a comprehensive book reproducing Carriere's major works, with an introduction by Robert Rosenblum and text by Robert Bantens, who’s 1975 monograph has been the only book in English on Carriere.