Monet to Matisse opens at Fubon Art Museum in December: 57 works and NT$400 advance tickets
Fubon Art Museum will show 57 Toledo Museum of Art works by 53 artists from December 12 to April 13, 2027. Explore five chapters, key ways of looking and advance-ticket details.
Fubon Art Museum will present A Century of Modern Art – Monet to Matisse: Treasures from the Toledo Museum of Art II from December 12, 2026 to April 13, 2027. The exhibition brings together 57 works by 53 artists from the American museum’s collection. Advance sales began on October 20, with an individual advance ticket priced at NT$400 against a regular NT$500. Beyond its famous names, the exhibition offers a route from everyday landscapes towards abstraction.
The exhibition’s key visual.
Five chapters place artistic change back in everyday life
The exhibition is arranged around modern life, new perspectives on the world, new images of people, reconstructions of everyday subjects and converging forms of abstraction. These can be approached as five questions: what life is being painted, where the world is seen from, how a person is represented, how familiar things are taken apart, and what colour and line can express when recognisable outlines recede.
Questions like these can be more accessible to first-time visitors than memorising movement names. In each chapter, choose one work that makes you pause, identify its clearest formal change, then compare it with another. Famous names provide an entrance; the lasting memory may be a small visual detail that suddenly becomes understandable.
From Monet’s water to Picasso’s multiple viewpoints
The Water Lilies shown here relates to Monet’s late exploration of large panoramic compositions. Look at how the horizon disappears and water, sky and reflections overlap. Rather than serving only as a window facing in one direction, the image invites viewers to reconsider their place within the landscape. Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers places labour and the countryside within bright colour, allowing an ordinary subject to carry questions about life.
Claude Monet, Water Lilies.Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers.
Picasso’s Woman in a Black Hat offers another change in viewpoint. The figure is constructed through geometric planes rather than a single fixed perspective. Instead of immediately asking whether it resembles a real person, follow the directions of the hat, face and body, and consider how different angles coexist. That process can also provide an entry into later abstract works.
Pablo Picasso, Woman in a Black Hat.
Matisse and Mondrian make colour a subject in its own right
Matisse’s Resting Dancer brings together the figure, decoration and vivid colour, with a picture within the picture offering another detail to find. Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, and Gray shifts comparison towards the size of colour blocks, the position of black lines and the surrounding white space. Follow the lines with your eyes and consider how the composition balances tension between its edges.
Henri Matisse, Resting Dancer.Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, and Gray.
The exhibition will be in the museum’s first-floor Water Garden Gallery at 79 Songgao Road, Xinyi District, Taipei. Advance sales continue until December 11, with merchandise bundles also available. Check what each ticket and product package includes before purchasing. October is the advance-sales period; visits begin on December 12. Consult the museum’s official exhibition page for current dates and ticket information.
