French Moderns at the Frick echoes loudly in today’s changing world

It’s a time of upheaval, income inequality, and war. New technologies have dramatically reshaped society. Artists, writers, and architects are responding by pushing the limits of their disciplines. In some cases, they’ve gathered to discuss how to respond, making work that holds up a mirror to the inequity and alienation they see in contemporary life. This description works as well for 2026 as it does for the era of modernism in France. In their time, artists such as Henri Matisse, Pierre-August Renoir, and Edgar Degas broke with old traditions and reshaped how creative people perceive and respond to a chaotic world. “That’s what I see in the art world today, is people grappling with the moment,” Frick Pittsburgh Executive Director Amanda Dunyak Gillen tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “Part of what this group over that century was trying to do was to make sense of the world, and working together or looking at each other’s ideas.” The Frick Art Museum’s new exhibition, French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degas , groups this confluence of ideas by subject matter. The 56 paintings that make up the show run the gamut from the first inklings of Modernism through to the abstraction of the early 20th century, from paintings of rural life to colorful compositions that send up industrial urbanity.  On loan from the Brooklyn Museum, the artworks feel right at home in the Frick’s ornate galleries. Yet there’s a subtle element of iconoclasm in displaying working-class art in a decidedly upper-crust setting that mirrors other changes in Frick’s programming . For many fin-de-siècle collectors like the Frick family, gauzy landscapes, working-class subjects, and abstraction were seen as vulgar. The Frick’s chief curator, Dawn Brean, says the exhibition is arranged, in part, to underscore this tension. “Artists have always helped us understand the changing world around us, so all of this rapid technological expansio