For much of the past century, modern art has been explained through labels: Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism.
Yet French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degasat the Frick Pittsburgh asks viewers to look beyond stylistic movements and instead consider the forces that shaped them. Spanning a century of French painting, the exhibition unfolds against a backdrop of industrialization, sweeping political change, imperial expansion, photography, cinema and two world wars. These developments fundamentally altered how people experienced time, space and reality. More than a survey of modern French art, the exhibition becomes a portrait of artists continually reinventing—or refusing to reinvent—their practice in response to a changing world. In doing so, it raises a question that feels every bit as urgent today as it did a century ago: What is the role of art when technology transforms the way people see?
That question, says Dawn Brean, Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Frick Pittsburgh, is what binds together a century of artistic experimentation. “The biggest thread that I can see in this exhibition is artists who are grappling with change,” she said. The painters represented in French Moderns lived through immense political, social and cultural upheaval as industrialization transformed cities, photography challenged long-held assumptions about representation, railroads collapsed distances, cinema introduced entirely new visual languages and imperialism and world wars reshaped everyday life. Across those disruptions, Brean sees artists returning to two deceptively simple questions: “What does it mean to represent something that is real?” she asked. “What does it mean to represent something that is true?”
Instead of presenting a familiar chronological progression through Realism, Impressionism and Cubism, the exhibition is organized thematically, placing landscapes beside landscapes, portraits beside portraits and still lifes alongside still lifes. Artists separated by decades suddenly appear to be speaking to one another. “You’ll see how artists are responding to these often revisited subject matters in different ways throughout time,” Brean said. “There’s a wonderful opportunity to see which artists are agreeing with each other, whether they’re separated by 50 or 75 years, and which artists are kind of at odds, or where you see the tension arise.”
One of her favorite pairings places William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s The Elder Sister beside Berthe Morisot’s portrait of her cousin and young daughter. Bouguereau’s polished academic realism contrasts sharply with Morisot’s loose brushwork and fleeting observations. Displayed together, the paintings reveal just how disruptive Impressionism once appeared. “It’s such a recognizable style,” Brean said. “You see it on umbrellas and mouse pads and T-shirts, and it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary their ideas were.” The disagreement, she argues, was never merely stylistic. It reflected fundamentally different beliefs about what painting was meant to accomplish.
Photography intensified those questions. Today cameras feel so commonplace that it is difficult to imagine the disruption they caused during the nineteenth century, when painters occupied an unrivaled position as image-makers. “It maybe is too simplistic, but at the same time it absolutely isn’t,” Brean said when asked whether photography changed painting forever. “I think there’s an undeniable impact that photography makes on art.” Ironically, she notes, photography was initially dismissed because it was not created directly by hand. “It’s really interesting that when photography first comes about, it’s not considered art because it’s technically a machine.” Yet artists could not ignore its implications. “If a photograph can capture reality, what is our role?” Brean said. “What should we be creating? How can we compete with photography? Or how can we show that we’re superior to photography in any way?”
Photography, in a way, freed artists from many of the obligations that had previously defined the medium. Monet pursued atmosphere and shifting light. Others explored memory, sensation and perception. “I think so many artists are thinking about how to capture the more ephemeral effects of vision or the more fugitive aspects of light,” Brean said. By the time visitors reach Cubism, those explorations become even more ambitious. “The Cubists are thinking, ‘How can we represent perception?'” she said. “As opposed to depicting one thing naturally, it starts to become a discussion of how to depict an idea. Can you depict an idea? A sensation? An emotion?”
The same curiosity extended to other technologies. Brean points to Fernand Léger, whose paintings absorbed lessons from cinema. “He was very inspired by the rise of cinematography,” she said. “The way that he combines shapes and movement is almost a visual representation of fast cutting and different perception and vantage points.” Looking across the exhibition, she argues that modernism ultimately becomes less a style than a way of thinking. “I think modernism is a way of seeing,” she said. “There’s no one specific stylistic innovation that is modernism. Modern life looks so different in that moment.”
The exhibition inevitably invites comparisons to another technological turning point. Artificial intelligence has raised many of the same broad questions about originality, authorship and creativity that photography once did, although Brean is careful not to overstate the parallel. “I won’t pretend to be an expert,” she said. Even so, the moment gives her pause. “It is a little scary to think of things being created without the hand of the artist.” Her concern is less about technology itself than about what artists contribute to society. Looking back at the century represented in French Moderns—a period marked by imperialism, revolutions, social upheaval and war—she sees artists continually helping people interpret a rapidly changing world. “Artists have always helped us understand the world around us,” she said. “That is what a lot of these artists are doing between 1850 and 1950.” Faced with unprecedented change, they asked how painting itself might respond. “I imagine that artists are in that moment of tumult and change right now.”
Christiane Leach, the Pittsburgh multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer known as Madame Dolores, notes that today’s debate begins with a question many people rarely ask: who decided artificial intelligence was inevitable? She recalls hearing discussions decades ago about technologies that would eventually evolve into today’s AI systems, long before the term entered everyday conversation. As an artist, she says, she has always experimented with new technologies before deciding how—or whether—they belong in her own work. “I test out everything, and then I make decisions,” she said. But today’s landscape feels fundamentally different because artists increasingly have little choice. “We are stuck having to use these tools to reach our audiences,” she said. “When they say AI isn’t going anywhere, that is a decision.” Increasingly, she argues, people are expected to use AI whether they actively choose to or not. “Every aspect of the work that we’re doing, whether it’s using Microsoft, Google, we are forced into it,” she said. “It’s not even something that we can select. We actually have to unselect.” What once required opting in has quietly become the default. “It used to be something that you could select,” she said. “Now it’s something you have to unselect.”
Leach insists the real issue is not technology itself but intent. “As with any tool, it depends on the intent. It depends on the intent of the creator. It depends on what is the actual purpose of the tool,” she said. She readily acknowledges that AI may prove transformative in medicine, scientific research and accessibility. “I would understand training it on creativity because science and medicine are about pushing knowledge forward.” But she repeatedly returns to the same question: “What is the purpose? What is the value of that?” Simply because something can be built, she argues, does not necessarily mean it should be. She worries that today’s technological culture often prioritizes expansion over reflection. “Just because you can do something,” she said, “what is the value of that?”
Leach is equally skeptical of comparisons between photography and generative AI. Photography, she argues, remained a human craft. “A person still has to operate that.” Cameras, computers and even the electric guitar changed artistic practice, but they did not replace lived experience. “People were mad when the electric guitar came on the scene,” she said. “Change is not easy.” AI, by contrast, presents what she sees as a fundamentally different ethical problem. “We’re at now a cultural shift towards theft,” she said. “Without the internet and taking whatever it wants to make what it wants, behind AI there would not be millions of people managing it.” Discussions about AI often focus on what it produces. Leach instead focuses on what it consumes. “Without the input of humanity, it is nothing,” she said. “The original is the human brain.”
That argument ultimately returns to the same territory explored throughout French Moderns: lived experience. Monet’s landscapes are not merely records of scenery. Morisot’s portraits are not simply likenesses. They attempt to capture perception itself—something inseparable from the people living it. Leach believes that remains true today. “AI cannot be born within the womb,” she said. “It cannot stumble and fall. It cannot wrestle with ideas of why are we here.” It cannot accumulate wisdom through failure or experience. “It has no lived experience whatsoever,” she said. “There is no birth. There is no scraping through life.” That is why mistakes occupy such an important place in her own creative process. Pointing to discoveries like penicillin, she argues that accidents have long fueled innovation. Discussing her own recordings, she described deliberately preserving imperfections. “The challenge was to bring my humanity to the tool,” she said. “I made decisions to leave mistakes in. I made decisions to make it dirty and grungy.” AI, she worries, encourages the opposite. “Instead of the tool giving you the ability to learn, your brain does nothing,” she said. “You don’t go on a journey. You don’t actually learn.”
Those observations unexpectedly echo one of Brean’s favorite aspects of modern painting. One of the major ideas challenged during the nineteenth century was the expectation that paintings should conceal evidence of their own making. “The painting itself wasn’t supposed to draw attention to itself,” Brean said. “The way you painted the canvas wasn’t supposed to compete with the subject matter.” Modern painters overturned that convention. Looking at Morisot’s brushwork, Brean says, “You know that there’s a human being behind that.”
Leach extends that idea beyond the visible brushstroke. She rejects the increasingly common distinction between art and community engagement because every work already contains family histories, neighborhoods, relationships, travel and memory. “Every engagement we’ve ever had” becomes part of artistic practice, she said. “It is the actual experience of what it is to be human.” Machines, by contrast, lack selfhood itself. “You have to have the ability of self-reflection,” she said. “You have to have self. There is no self.”
Those concerns extend beyond aesthetics into the everyday realities of creative labor. Leach acknowledges that many artists appreciate AI as a practical tool for grant writing or navigating institutions that reward bureaucratic language. “There is a kind of liberation in that,” she said. Others see it as a way to reach wider audiences. Yet she also hears growing concern from musicians, writers and visual artists whose voices, styles and labor can now be replicated before they have an opportunity to protect them. “We barely get paid as it is,” she said. “We constantly have to tell people we’re of value. We feed the soul.” Increasingly, artists are expected to function as content creators competing in an algorithm-driven attention economy. “Now we’re talking about popularity,” she said. “We’re not talking about the meaning of someone’s work and the power.” The challenge, she believes, is not simply technological but cultural: “What it takes to be an artist is to question reality. It’s to reflect reality. It’s to push against truth and lies. Machines cannot do that.”
As Brean reflects on the artists gathered throughout the exhibition, she sees them confronting uncertainty much as artists do today. “Artists have always helped us understand the world around us,” she said. “That is what a lot of these artists were doing between 1850 and 1950. They’re thinking, ‘How do we depict the changing world around us?’ I imagine that artists are in that moment of tumult and change right now.”
