History Redrawn

Never heard of Adolphe Appian or Jules Breton? Auguste Lepère and Charles Milcendeau don’t ring a bell? Contemporaries of such better-known artists as Toulouse–Lautrec and Gustave Courbet, they are part of a large group of skilled artists whom history has largely overlooked. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ Expanding the Boundaries: Selected Drawings from the Yvonne and Gabriel P. Weisberg Collection represents a small but significant effort to correct that oversight by introducing us to a trove of artists, popular in their own time, who are waiting to be rediscovered.

A Tanner Smoking His Pipe, Lucien Ott, 1918

The exhibition, which features nearly fifty works on paper—drawings, charcoals, pastels, watercolors—by forty artists, is a labor of love. Gabriel Weisberg is a longtime art history professor at the University of Minnesota who, along with his wife, Yvonne, has spent years researching and collecting works by lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Belgian artists. The Weisbergs gave their collection to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2002, and it is now getting at least some of the attention it deserves.

The 100-plus pieces fill in some gaps in the institute’s collection, making it possible to offer researchers and museum visitors a more complete view of the period. And while many of the artists aren’t familiar now, “a lot of these artists are going to get more attention” as the Weisbergs and other art historians continue to study them, says curator Lisa Michaux.

Through Apr. 5. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls., 612-870-3131