THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
There many reasons to go to After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, the current show at the National Gallery. Actually, there are more than 96 reasons - the number of objects displayed. It is a wonderful collection of some of the world’s great pieces from one of the most important periods in Western art. It includes paintings and sculpture from most of the major artists of the late 19th and early 20th Century. While there is a focus on the three featured artists; Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, there are also major works from Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Klimt and many more.
Another reason to go is the artworks from private collections, which are rarely seen by the public. Going to the National Gallery will also save you the cost of traveling to the more than 40 museums from Amersfoort to Zaragoza that have loaned pieces to the exhibit. But even if one had access to all the private collections and museums participating in After Impressionism it still would be worth going. The sum is greater than the whole.
The most compelling reason is the exhibit itself. After Impressionism is itself a work of art; a magnificently curated show that uses the works to tell the story of a major moment in the development of human perception. While focused on the plastic arts, it is a multi-faceted exploration of a major shift in how humanity experiences the world. It tracks simultaneous and interlocking movements in areas including music, literature, architecture, and interior design. It discusses the influence of writers including Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Tolstoy, Ibsen and Rilke and musicians like Wagner, Debussy and Mahler.
While acknowledging the centrality of Paris After Impressionism includes important works from movements in Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels and Vienna. It also shows the profound influence of the arts of Africa, Japan and Oceania that was being explored by Europeans.
Using painting and sculpture After Impressionism tells the story of the shift from Impressionism’s challenge to figurative art to abstraction, where colors, shapes, line, texture and materials become the subject thereby freeing art from the need to reflect a specific reality. These transitions are told through the works of the artists who pioneered them.
So before going to any of the other museums in London, see this show. It will help explain how perception shifted into the modern. It helps explain how the Rothko murals got to the Tate Modern. It traces the path from Reynolds to Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery.
If you just want to experience art without explanation there are 96 reasons to do just that. Go for the sheer joy of standing in front of André Derain’s Le Dance, for appreciating the motion caught in the metal of’ Camille Claudel’s sculpture; for meditating on the light in Théo van Rysselberghe’s The Scheldt Upstream from Antwerp. One could easily spend the better part of the day moving from one experience to the other and not make your way through the whole exhibit.
Probably the most important reason to see this exhibit of the work of great artists is to learn how we have become who we are because of who they were.
