'After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art'
looks at the ferment in European art from about 1886 to 1914.
It is a broad-brush look at the incredible experimentation
the art was undergoing not only in Paris, but in all the major cities of Europe.
There were these other centres that were beginning to really establish
their own identity in terms of art, such as Berlin.
One of the important things
about Berlin during this period is how fast it grew, how quickly it modernised.
It not only doubles its population, but it also becomes the centre of modern concepts
across the board - electric light in the streets, trams, undergrounds, the whole thing.
There was also a sense of urgency among the artists working in Berlin.
And so, by the latter part of the 1890s, a group of some fifty artists get together
and decide that they're going to break away from that and establish their own exhibition body.
And it became known as the Secession.
Two figures who become members of this secession in 1902, Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt,
are both thinking about updating classical mythological subjects
through modernising their presentation and through much, much looser, freer brushwork.
Artists were invited
from outside Germany, so Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin
and the younger generation all found their way to the platform of the Secession.
We also were including a Norwegian artist in Berlin.
That seems strange, but actually Edvard Munch, who was having difficulty getting recognised
in his native Norway, had come to Berlin, where he was offered an exhibition in 1892.
Highly controversial, but it made his reputation and as a result, he used Berlin as his main platform
for exposing himself to both a national and an international audience.
Vienna was another centre of creative ferment,
and there too, you see patterns similar to what had been established in Berlin,
with a small group of artists breaking away from the traditional exhibition bodies.
Vienna 1900 has become a synonym for a time of tremendous sociopolitical, economic and cultural change.
There were two main institutions where cultural, liberal life was taking place in Vienna,
and these were the salons and coffee houses.
We are actually here now in the Café Sperl which was founded in 1880,
the regular meeting place for the Siebener Club, which is the club of seven,
including Max Kurzweil, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, who would then be founders of the Secession in 1897.
The Secession Building was finished in 1898.
It was very different to all the buildings around it.
And also something that was always very much ridiculed was a dome of Golden Laurels,
which was actually referred to as the cabbage head, the ‘Krauthappel’.
The motto of the Secession, which was also put in writing on the building was ‘Der Zeit ihre Kunst,
Der Kunst ihre Freiheit’, which translates to ‘to every age its art, to art, its freedom’.
The 1902 exhibition at the Secession
dedicated to Beethoven was a tremendous success.
‘The Beethoven Frieze’ by Gustav Klimt, founder of the Secession, shows a step forward in his art.
It was the beginning of the golden period.
He starts to really, really concentrate on the expressive line,
being very much interested in also the ornament.
Women were not allowed to be members of the Secession, yet they played an integral part
not only as exhibiting artists but also as patrons,
as muses, as a sounding board, or as critics.
We have patrons such as the Bloch-Bauer family
and the woman of the house, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was painted several times by Klimt.
A painting from the Belvedere, which is actually going to the show
in London, is Broncia Koller-Pinell’s painting of her mother.
The painting was shown at the Kunstschau in 1908.
One third of the artists showing at the exhibition were female artists.
Women did have many challenges that they had to face during this period to become artists.
They weren't able to train at the official academies, for example,
the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris didn't accept women students until 1897,
so they had to find other ways to gain the kind of training and access
to artistic opportunities that their male counterparts found more easily.
However, as the century progressed, you have the establishment, for example, of one of
possibly the most famous and most important academies in Paris for women, the Académie Julian,
which was established specifically to offer a means of training
beyond the École de Beaux-Arts, quite unprecedented for the time in accepting women.
After 1900, you really have
this blooming of women's involvement and engagement with the development of art.
They’re exhibiting widely across Europe in all the major art shows.
They are having dedicated retrospective exhibitions, and so they're really placing themselves
on the map alongside their male colleagues.
Brussels is one of the key cities
in terms of its own particular take on modernism.
A small group of artists, 20 of them, decided to break away and form their own
exhibition body, which they called suitably enough, the twenty, Les Vingt.
And for ten years they held regular annual exhibitions in which they not only exhibited
their own work, but also had a policy of inviting artists not only from Belgium, but
also internationally, from America, from the UK,
from Germany, from Spain, and of course from Paris.
There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the two cities,
and so you find these bridges being built, which allowed for Belgian artists
to visit Paris on a regular basis, suggest who should be invited to the Les Vingt exhibitions,
and provide a route in for exposure to other Belgian and non-Belgian artists
to radical new movements in Paris.
In 1887, Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat is invited to exhibit at Les Vingt.
Two of the Belgian artists take one look at Neo-Impressionism and think,
my goodness, that is something completely new and different.
They were seeking their own Belgian voice.
So if you look carefully at their palette, purple against gold in the case of van Rysselberghe,
or grey versus lilac versus green in the van de Velde, you are in a new colour world.
And it's that world that dominates the art of those particular artists
and of Belgian art.
Around the turn of the century,
Barcelona is one of the major centres of thinking about modernism in Europe,
and this group of avant-garde artists that includes Picasso, that includes Nonell, that includes Casas,
are people who are constantly in dialogue with especially Paris, but also really Brussels.
Els Quatre Gats was set up basically as sort of a hang-out for these modernist artists.
And it was a coffee shop, it was a bar, it was a meeting place, but it was also a place
for exhibitions and it was one of the most avant-garde venues in Barcelona around 1900.
And it was the place where Pablo Picasso had his very first individual exhibition in 1899,
and is very soon recognised as a real talent, even at the age of 18.
And he's asked if he'll design the menu for Els Quatre Gats.
On one side, there is this wonderful illustration by Picasso, and on the other side
a reproduction of a charcoal drawing of the barman, Pere Romeu by Ramón Casas.
So it puts together all these amazing figures of modernism in just two little sheets.
Above the seating area in Els Quatre Gats was this huge illustrative,
almost newspaper style illustration, but it was a painting by Ramón Casas,
and it shows him as well as Pere Romeu, who’s the very recognisable, craggy-
faced bar owner and operator, riding a tandem bicycle,
which is a very novel and strange technology.
A couple of years later, I believe in 1901, that canvas of the bicycle
is joined by a picture that depicts the same two people, this time
in a motorcar making, I think, just the same kind of statement about progress,
and they want to represent modernity and a break with tradition.
The Gran Teatre del Liceu is the main opera house in Barcelona.
The club that’s attached to it is a private members club and it's called
the Círculo del Liceo, and the members asked Ramón Casas, who at the time
was the leading painter in Barcelona, to make a huge series of decorations.
Casas created a series of 12 panels, on the themes of different kinds of music.
And of course, the picture that is part of the exhibition
represents a woman incongruously driving an automobile straight out towards you.
And it's not really immediately clear what it has to do with music.
But if you look up in the top right corner there’s a sort of a shadowy conductor
figure sort of in a bandstand.
And this actually is Casas looking back to the Universal Exposition of 1888,
during which the Círculo del Liceo had paid for an orchestral performance.
These works being here all together, I think lets us look at the really signal contribution
that Barcelona made to modern art as we know it today.
The exhibition explores a moment of intense creativity in European culture.
Visitors will see the range of experimentation that suddenly erupted across Europe.
Innovation in colour, innovation in form,
innovation in the ways in which representation takes place.
And it was a struggle, but women were among the most adventurous
and innovative of artists, insistent on being seen as part of this European avant-garde.
All of these things were truly unanticipated before 1886, and that they should happen so quickly,
and with such abundance right across Europe is a phenomenon
that still fascinates.