During the first French state visit to the US during Donald Trump’s presidency this week, the First Lady and her French counterpart Brigitte Macron took time to visit the Paul Cezanne show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
According to an official statement from the White House, the tour emphasized the work of a French artist “to complement the longstanding friendship between the United States and France.” The White House added that “spousal events” are a tradition of state visits.
The tour took place ahead of a sumptuous state dinner, where a number of art-world luminaries were in attendance. The guest list included luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault and his wife Hélène; collector Henry Kravis and MoMA board president Marie-Josée Kravis and Laurence des Cars, the director of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay.
On Instagram, Melania Trump posted a snap of the pair admiring Cézanne’s The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement (1866) with the gallery’s curator of French paintings, Mary Morton, and deputy director Franklin Kelly. Morton co-organized the show with John Elderfield, MoMA’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, and Xavier Rey, the director of the Musées de Marseille.
In a further statement from the White House, Trump called the works “breathtaking,” adding, “Everyone understands the language of art.”
The exhibition, “Cézanne Portraits,” brings together around 60 post-Impressionist paintings ranging from self-portraits to portraits of friends and working-class people in the artist’s native Aix-en-Provence.
The show includes about a quarter of the 200 portraits Cézanne is known to have painted in his career. He painted 26 self-portraits and 29 portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Cézanne is a hugely important figure in art history, influencing the art of Cubists, Fauvists and successive generations of avant-garde artists.
The exhibition opened in Paris first and ran at the Musée d’Orsay from 13 June-24 September 2017 last year , before it went to the NPG from 26 October-11 February 2018, and finally the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 25 March-1 July 2018.