Installation view of the Bloch Galleries of European Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City. Photo by Joshua Ferdinand.
Paul Cézanne, French (1839–1906), Man with a Pipe, 1890–1892. Oil on canvas, 17 x 13½ inches. Gift of Henry W. and Marion H. Bloch, 2015. Courtesy The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Bloch Galleries of European Art

Opening March 11, 2017

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

4525 Oak St, Kansas City, MO

For information, call 816.751.1278
or visit www.nelson-atkins.org


After an extensive renovation, the Bloch Galleries of European Art have opened at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City. The new gallery space, located in the museum’s original 1933 Beaux-Arts building, features twenty-nine masterpieces of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. The Bloch Galleries was made possible by a $12 million gift from the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation, given to the museum in 2015.

 

The opening of the galleries coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Steven Holl-designed Bloch Building, a 165,000-square foot expansion that dramatically boosted the public profile of the museum by increasing the institution’s permanent collection space by 71 percent. The Museum, which currently draws more than half a million visitors each year, is renowned for its European collections, which includes canonical works by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and El Greco, as well as one of only twenty-five authenticated works by Hieronymus Bosch.


Among the highlights in the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art are works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Marion and Henry Bloch began assembling the collection 40 years ago, beginning with Auguste Renoir’s Woman Leaning on her Elbows (1976). Rounding out the collection is a snow scene by Alfred Sisley; Manet’s White Lilacs in a Crystal Vase (1882 or 1883), painted while he was confined to bed by illness at the end of his life; Van Gogh’s Restaurant Rispal at Asnières (1887), and Cézanne’s Man with a Pipe (1890–1892).