Cleveland Museum openings

The Cleveland Museum of Art opened two major spring shows over the past two weeks, with “Manet & Morisot” now on view through July 5 and “Martin Puryear: Nexus” opening April 12 through August 9. (clevelandart.org) “Manet & Morisot” opened March 29 in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery as the first major exhibition focused on the artistic exchange between Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. The museum says the show brings together 36 paintings and seven works on paper from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. (clevelandart.org) “Martin Puryear: Nexus” opened Sunday, April 12, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery 224B. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, co-organized the survey, which includes about 50 works across sculpture, drawing, prints, and maquettes. (clevelandart.org) The two shows anchor the museum’s spring and summer ticketed program, and the museum is selling a combo package that cuts as much as $9 off the combined admission price. The museum’s spring and summer promotions describe them as its two special exhibitions for the season. (clevelandart.org) The exhibitions also sit inside a larger anniversary year. In December, the museum said its 2026 schedule would mark the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 110th anniversary with featured exhibitions on Andrew Wyeth, Martin Puryear, Manet and Morisot, and medieval Korea. (clevelandart.org) For “Manet & Morisot,” the museum is pushing a revision to a familiar Impressionist story. Curator Heather Lemonedes Brown told Ideastream that Morisot was “not merely a muse,” and that the exhibition looks at how the two artists influenced each other’s work. (ideastream.org) For Puryear, the museum is emphasizing scale and rarity. Its April 9 press release calls “Nexus” the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in nearly two decades, and says the show spans more than half a century of work in wood, rawhide, glass, marble, and metal. (clevelandart.org) The museum has built programming around both exhibitions, including optional guided tours and a free April 29 talk, “Manet & Morisot: An Impressionist Friendship,” in Gartner Auditorium. That gives Cleveland visitors a second reason to come back after the opening weekend: the galleries are new, but the calendar around them is still filling in. (clevelandart.org)