Super Bowl Town Museums Put Impressionist Art On The Line

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Jan 29th 2011 at 7:04PM

Super Bowl XLV is just over a week away and the rivalry between Green Bay and Pittsburgh has heated up. The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art have decided to make a friendly wager on the football game. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that each is offering up an Impressionist work of art. If the Packers win the Carnegie Museum will send over Renoir's "Bathers with Crab" for a temporary loan where visitors can see it and not only take in some beautiful art but gloat a bit too. Should the Steelers prove victorious, "Boating on the Yerres" by Gustav Caillebotte will be taking the journey to the Carnegie.

This is the second year in a row that art critic Tyler Green has prompted a bet. Last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art squared off which resulted "The Fifth Plague of Egypt", 1800, a landscape by British artist J.M.W. Turner spending a few months in new Orleans where it was displayed with a Lombardi-trophy-shaped sign designating the triumph.

Tags: caillebotte, green bay packers, impressionist, impressionist art, impressionists, Indianapolis Colts, renoir, Super Bowl XLV