A blockbuster that doesn’t make the most of its riches
ALASTAIR SMART
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art The National Gallery, London
Until August 13 ★★★★★
This is a strange exhibition. It’s peppered with masterpieces by some of the greatest artists of all time, from Cézanne and Gauguin to Van Gogh. In some cases – such as Gauguin’s La Vague (The Wave), a bird’s-eye view of bathers on a Breton beach fleeing a huge wave – the masterpieces are on loan from private collections and rarely seen in public. It focuses on a generation of artists who were active between 1886 (the year of the Impressionists’ final exhibition in Paris) and 1914 (the year of the outbreak of the First World War): a generation often referred to as the Post-Impressionists.
Broadly speaking, they took painting in brilliant new directions by rejecting realistic visions of the world around them and included the likes of Picasso and Matisse.
In other words, this exhibition oozes blockbuster potential. Few periods boast the riches of the one under consideration here. That, however, is also this show’s problem: the curators bite off more than they can chew.
They make the case that Post Impressionists across Europe made great advances – not just in Paris, but also Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona and Vienna. These advances were highly varied, though, and featuring examples of so many of them in the same show feels a stretch.
How to equate, for instance, the Pointillist experiments of Théo van Rysselberghe in Belgium with the Expressionist ones of Oskar Kokoschka in Austria? Or, for that matter, the discomforting female nudes painted by Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt in Berlin?
Post-Impressionism is too broad a subject for any one exhibition. This is full of fine works but they don’t quite hang together.