Austin now has three full years to stand face to face with some of the boldest painting of the modern age. The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is presenting The European Avant-Garde: From Impressionism to Cubism, Works from the Robertson Foundation, a special presentation in Gallery B4 on view from September 27, 2026 through August 5, 2029.
The show brings together fourteen works by Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and others, drawn from the celebrated collection of Julian and Josie Robertson. Together they trace how artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries broke with tradition and reinvented painting – from Monet’s luminous studies of light and atmosphere to Picasso’s radical breaking-up of forms. Along the way, color, space and composition were never quite the same again.
The presentation also honors a Texas story. Josephine Josie Tucker Robertson (1943-2010) was born in San Antonio and earned her fine arts degree at UT Austin in 1965. With her husband, Julian H. Robertson Jr. (1932-2022), she began assembling this distinguished group of European modern works in the late 1980s. Visitors who want a guided start can join the Modern Artists public tour on Tuesday, October 20, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., included with admission. Admission to the presentation is included with museum admission and is free for Blanton members – a joyful, unhurried invitation to see how modern painting was born, right here in Austin.
Photo: Claude Monet, La Seine a Argenteuil (1877), Robertson Foundation, courtesy Blanton Museum of Art
