A well-conceived exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art makes good use of objects in the collection to expand understanding of an extremely popular group of artists. It also serves as introduction to the style of a new curator.

	Mary Cassatt's "In the Omnibus," 1890-1891 Click photo for larger image. "The Impressionist Era: Works on Paper From the Collection" When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. Where: Carnegie Museum of Art, Oakland. Admission: $10, seniors $7, students/children $6, members free. Information: 412-622-3131 or visit www.cmoa.org.

"The Impressionist Era: Works on Paper From the Collection" bookends the Impressionist artists with their predecessors and contemporaries who were not part of the movement, and with artists who followed them.

The exhibition affords an opportunity to see prints and drawings by artists frequently best known for their freely brushed, light-filled paintings. It also shows less familiar members of the group.

And it offers some answers to the question of who is considered an Impressionist, and why.

This is the first Carnegie exhibition organized by assistant curator of fine arts Amanda Zehnder, who arrived at the museum last August. She replaced well-regarded associate curator of fine arts Linda Batis, who had moved with her husband to Greece.

Zehnder, a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, earned a Ph.D. in the history of art from Bryn Mawr College. She also received an M.A. from Bryn Mawr and a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Her dissertation addressed intersections in the careers of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, so a first exhibition that contains works by each of these artists is particularly suitable.

Impressionist is not a term that the artists themselves chose. It had negative connotations when first used in 1874 by a French critic responding to the subject matter and what was then considered the unfinished quality of Monet's painting "Impression Sunrise," displayed in the group's first exhibition in Paris.

There were only eight Impressionist exhibitions, the last held in 1886, in which 57 artists overall participated, some more regularly than others. Stylistically their work was quite varied, and it would be difficult to categorize them simply by formal qualities.

Vincent van Gogh's "The Man With the Pipe, Portrait of Dr. Gachet," 1890 Click photo for larger image.

Rather, Zehnder asserts, what linked them was their rebelliousness -- not only in pursuit of a new aesthetic, but in challenging the authority of the Salons, prestigious exhibitions that were a product of the tradition-infused Academy of Fine Arts, which snubbed art that didn't fit its rigid, academic standards.

The Impressionists were an intellectual and social society whose members sought to institute a power shift, the repercussions of which continue in the art world today. It is telling that they preferred to be known as the "Independents," if by any title at all.

The first gallery includes such artists as Millet, best known for his portrayal of peasant life and an early proponent of the mid-19th-century revival of interest in etching, and Corot, who at times was negatively criticized for a perceived unfinished quality in his use of line, an aesthetic choice that especially enlivens two lithographs.

Noteworthy is a recent addition to the collection, the pastel "Wheatfield" by Leon-Augustin Lhermitte, a contemporary of the Impressionists who never exhibited with them although he was stylistically aligned.

The central gallery shows the enthusiasm the artists had for printmaking and the ways they would make the medium their own. It also illustrates their breadth of style, from the tour-de-force realism in the "Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt" by Felix Bracquemond, one of four artists who entered prints in the first Impressionist exhibition, to Renoir's freely drawn portrait of his son Jean, "Child With a Biscuit."

	Pierre Bonnard's lithograph "The Little Laundress," 1896. Click photo for larger image.

Several works by Cassatt, including three exceptional color prints from her notable series "The Ten," show the influence exhibitions of Japanese ukiyo-e prints were having on artists in the French capital.

Here also are such notables as Degas, including an etching of Cassatt in the Louvre's Painting Gallery; Cezanne, including a lithograph based on his painting "Bathers at Rest"; Bonnard's splendid lithograph "The Little Laundress"; a handsome Gauguin woodcut, "Fresh Water Is Flowing," that heightens the exoticness of its Polynesian locale through color and shadow; and two works by Pissarro, the oldest founding member of the group and the only artist who exhibited in all eight exhibitions.

Finally, there are artists who were active at the turn of the 19th century, when printmaking skills were rewarded as publishers commissioned works for journals that were often sponsored by cabarets and cafes.

Here we find van Gogh's emotion-suffused "The Man With the Pipe, Portrait of Dr. Gachet"; Toulouse-Lautrec's flamboyant club world; and a potently graphic Villon, "The Cards," among others.

But these gallery categorizations are a convenience rather than an absolute, and it's evident that idea and technique aren't confined to one time period, nor do they spawn out of nothingness. The examples presented confirm that the undercurrents of change are always flowing.

For her first exhibition, Zehnder selected a topic familiar to most visitors and presented it in a manner that fosters better appreciation of it. Based on this, we may look forward to exhibitions that edify as well as visually please, as we had grown accustomed to experiencing in the Works on Paper Gallery.