After Impressionism: inventing modern art traces the path from those fuzzy haystacks, sunrises and lovely ladies, through the bold and the bizarre, through to full abstraction.
The first room sets the stage beautifully with a large Cezanne canvas of naked bathers … angular, odd and a somewhat sickly green… hung a few steps from the kind of thing the establishment probably preferred to buy at the time. Chavannes’ bathers in The Sacred Grove are classical deities in a sylvan landscape. It’s pretty. It’s safe. It’s entirely forgettable. (Literally. It’s on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum I practically grew up in, and I don’t remember ever seeing it.) The comparison between Chavannes and Cezanne tells you in a single glance how shocking the revolution of styles must have been.
The next gallery is likely to be most popular, with a lush and lavish collection of Van Goghs, Cezannes and Gaugins. After that comes a room with a lovely Seurat, and three by Paul Signac in a similar paint-with-dots style that fuses the ephemeral quality of impressionistic light with a more geometric approach to constructing a scene.
However pleasing many of these early canvases are to the eye, a more disturbing revolution is already brewing within them. Colours become increasingly unnatural. Lines, angles and shapes get bolder. A heady and sometimes disturbing sexuality creeps in to the female portraits. “Was Gaugin a paedophile?” wondered the friend I was with as we encountered a recumbent, pre-pubescent South Seas islander. Perhaps more disturbing was Gaugin’s attempt at pottery nearby; just the bottom half of a lop-sided head. You wouldn’t want this in your house, especially in dim light. We’re quickly moving away from the pleasing and towards the provocative as the reason for art.
From there the revolution picks up speed through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with significant pieces by all the names you’d expect: Klimt, Munch, Mondrian, Picasso. There’s a fair amount here you won’t have seen before, even if you are a habitual museum-goer; the curators are particularly proud of how much they’ve liberated from private collections. The later galleries explore the revolution by location, showing off similarities in groups of artists working in close proximity to each other. No, It’s not just your imagination. Vienna in the early 20th century was a very odd place.
The exhibition doesn’t bring it up, but I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that all the focus was on the continent. Back in Britain, leaders of fashion were supporting William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite movement. We might have been pushing the boundaries of industry and technology, but in art this country was looking back to Renaissance Italy, Ancient Rome or a romantic vision of the Middle Ages.
As someone who, in my professional life, spends an enormous amount of time talking about the ever-increasing pace of change since the turn of the 20th century and the growing stress of keeping up with it, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps modern art is a reflection of how we’re coping with this great acceleration. Some offers the safety of tradition or the comfort of gentle pleasure. Some reflects our fear and angst back at us. Some challenges us to stretch our imaginations beyond who and what we are now.
The path to modern art isn’t comfortable, but neither is modern life. The National Gallery does a find job of showing how the two grew together.
After Impressionism runs until 13 August
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