The Long Road of Modern Art: From Impressionism to Modernism
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The Impressionists not only changed the course of art history but paved the way for modern art. After 1886, the date of the last exhibition organized by the group in Paris, European artists were able to explore, innovate and experiment in different directions until the start of the First World War. “After Impressionism”, an ambitious and colossal exhibition at the National Gallery in London, chronicles “the invention of modern art” in the three decades between 1886 and 1914.
The rethinking of art and the relationship with the outside world
The only common trait is that all the artists on display have made their contribution to the rethinking of art and its relationship with the outside world, leaving behind the conventions of the nineteenth century and entering the new century under the banner of the new and of the modern. However, each artist has an unmistakable style of his: Paul Cézanne, who tried to represent the volume and structure of objects, landscapes or people; Vincent Van Gogh, who used the power of brushstrokes and colors to reveal the emotional potential of painting; Paul Gauguin, who turning his back on the Western tradition in search of the so-called “primitive” world paved the way for artists such as Henri Rousseau, the Symbolists and the Nabis, the “prophets”.
During that time Paris remained the cultural capital of the world, but other cities started to become avant-garde artistic centers. The room dedicated to Barcelona shows how it inspired Pablo Picasso and also produced resolutely modern works such as The car by Ramón Casas, which shows a woman, smiling and confident, driving the first car to arrive on the streets of the Catalan city in 1900. In Vienna, the Wiener Werkstatte promoted a “total” art that ranged from architecture to decorative arts and from fashionable painting, represented in the exhibition by Broncia Koller-Pinell and Gustav Klimt. In Berlin, the atmosphere created by artists such as Lovis Corinth and Kathe Kollwitz attracted artists such as Edvard Munch, who worked extensively in the capital, and led to the explosion of color of German Expressionism. Brussels, with original artists such as James Ensor, has cultivated links with the Parisian avant-garde, organizing exhibitions for artists such as Seurat, Signac, Gauguin and Van Gogh, who sold the only painting purchased in his lifetime in the Belgian capital.
Paris returns to the fore as the cradle of two great artistic movements at the beginning of the twentieth century: Fauvism, the colour-saturated “wild” art of Henri Matisse and André Derain, and the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque which heralded the art abstract.To take the next step towards abstraction were Piet Mondriaan in Holland and Wassily Kandinsky in Germany. A sequence of three paintings by Mondriaan perfectly illustrates the artist’s evolution: in the first work of 1906, the recognizable and majestic tree stands out against the sky; in the second of 1908 the tree is a simplified silhouette against a background of strong and decorative brushstrokes; in the third work of 1912 the presence of the tree can just be guessed among the unstructured geometric shapes. An “inevitable progression”, according to MaryAnne Stevens, curator of the exhibition, according to whom “this artistic period can claim the merit of having broken ties with tradition, laying the foundations for the art of the 20th and 2000s”.
One of the many joys of the exhibition is the large number of works from private collections, which are rarely seen. Many have never been exhibited in Britain before. The one hundred works on display also include sculptures, which usually do not have a presence in the National Gallery, to underline the importance of the dialogue between the two art forms in those years.
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