Colin's Cultural Corner 28/3/23 pt 1
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art - National Gallery
This exhibition shows the progression from Impressionist painters through Post-Impressionist to Cubist, Fauvre and unashamedly "modern" Art. That said it stops in roughly 1915 with very few paintings later than that.
We start with a Cézanne,
Bathers, and our attention is drawn specifically to the right hand seated figure and the shadow on her torso. This is apparently the first steps towards a less naturalistic representation of flesh and is the single brush stroke which spurs the creation of everything else here.
It's also clear that Cézanne had trouble painting hands and feet.
Anyway we move on from that through number of his still life's where he played with how natural looking items were arranged on unnatural surfaces. Then we have a number of works by various contemporaries of his using a variety of daubing methods of applying paint. Cue Pointillism and for me perhaps the most arresting image in the exhibition.
There's the usual Gaugin canvases including Nevermore which is being used to illustrate the artistic creation of an entirely unreal version of so called exotic life.
There's some Munch works from when he was very young including this one depicting his 17 year old sister on her death bed. He was just 20 when he painted this and it clearly show the path he's on regarding using painting to express emotion rather than reality.
There's some Rodin sculptures, some Degas paintings (not sure why he's included in here but then I find his work quite problematic, perhaps more so than Gaugin's Nevermore) and a trio of Mondrian paintings which were completed in a five year period.
Side by side they show the refinement, the abstraction if you prefer, or distillation of essence perhaps from what's a recognisable tree, through a tree where there's no hint of realism to a depiction of the exact same tree where he's moved beyond even trying to capture the form of the tree and is (apparently) focussing on the minute planes of leaves and bark and the interplay of light and shadow to force a paradigm shift in what was acceptable from art and artists.
The commentary goes to great lengths to remind us that many of these paintings, including some very well known ones I didn't take pics of, were rejected by the art establishment of the time. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime don't forget. There's a fair number of works by women artists of the time, contemporaries of Picasso or Van Gogh or others. None of those were well received by anyone other than perhaps artist friends of theirs and their contribution to Art is often overlooked but they have a place and an importance which is not really explored satisfactorily here.
What is here amounts to a very detailed lecture on how art styles moved on and continue to move on. Art didn't stop with the violence of WW1 but that violence is evident in the works on display, and especially in the sculpture below:
If memory serves me right it's called Lover's Embrace but there's a real sense of grief about it. You can't tell if the woman, with he head thrown back and the weight her limp limbs convey, is in a moment of ecstasy as her lover kisses her neck or if he's actually cradling a dead body.
On a general point, it was good to see a couple of Klimt's next to each other and to slot them into historical context. The white dress in one painting was designed not to be worn out and about but only to be worn to be painted in. The designer and Klimt worked together to create the gossamer like panels set out with squares of more opaque cloth so that they would suggest the form underneath. Both of these postdate the gold portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer who is the subject in the right hand painting.
Did I enjoy it? Yes. Sort of. It was a little dry. Perhaps a little academic for my tastes but it was interesting to see things in context. Sometimes we saw the same scene painted by three artists contemporaneously and it's curious to imagine the conversations they had about who did what better than the others.
