'After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art' looks at the ferment in European art,
painting and sculpture in particular, from about 1886 to 1914. We focus on Barcelona,
Brussels, Berlin and Vienna, as well as Paris with the great figures Cézanne, Gauguin,
Van Gogh, moving on to Picasso, Klimt, and we end with Abstraction and Mondrian.
There are 97 works, paintings and sculpture, an exhibition which really rethinks how artists
progressed. Now, for some artists, it led them very naturally from the high palette of say,
Paul Gauguin, through to the world of Matisse and Derain, Fauvism, in other words. Alternatively,
you can say, well, there's Cézanne and his palette, and his technique,
that leads to another movement that we immediately recognise - Cubism.
But then when you move elsewhere in Europe,
you have German Expressionism. Who were they looking at? They were looking at Van Gogh.
The exhibition explores a moment of intense creativity in European culture. Visitors will
see the range of experimentation that suddenly erupted in Paris,
but right across Europe, as new forms of painting and sculpture were invented
seemingly overnight and renewed and renewed. And that they should happen so quickly and
with such abundance, right across Europe is a phenomenon that still fascinates.
It was a moment of such change that even today we are still trying to assess its magnitude.
The first room introduces the two key points about the exhibition, which is that it is
about sculpture and painting, but they are combining their forces during this period.
You are greeted by two large and very surprising pieces of sculpture by a great French sculptor
Rodin. Alongside these, we have Cézanne's great, late painting 'The Bathers'. It's architectural,
even architectonic, and the faces themselves have no definition at all.
Indeed, they stare out as masks at the spectator,
almost as if they're staring into the future with a question mark hanging over them.
What next?
Looking at the work of this period, one has to be acutely aware of the context
within which these artists are functioning. Rapid modernisation, colonial expansion, rapid growth
of cities with urbanisation, and also with an acute awareness of the importance of science.
Paul Cézanne is one of the three great artists who really dominate the work that is being produced
between the latter part of the 1880s and 1914. His work seeks to understand the fundamental
underlying architecture of the form. He analyses that in terms of faceted surfaces, spaces that are
defined by flat surfaces, which he then reinforces through the use of brushwork, which is not all
over the place, but is actually very carefully organised in terms of parallel brushstrokes.
Now that became absolutely crucial for the Cubists. So
when Braque and Picasso were moving into Cubism,
that was exactly the principle they were trying to get at in order to create their own work.
The Dutchman Van Gogh had been painting in Holland for about ten years when he came to
Paris in 1886. He dives into the Paris avant-garde world. He meets everybody,
he absorbs every new movement, and perhaps more than anyone else,
begins to sense where art could go. In 1888, he decides that he wants to get away from Paris.
He wants to find a new environment. He heads south to Arles in Provence.
Arguably, the greatest paintings that Van Gogh produced during that period in Arles
are his five big sunflower paintings, one of them in the National Gallery.
With these pictures, Van Gogh had made a great breakthrough and those pictures
in particular would go on to have a huge influence right across Europe.
In fact, this exhibition will give the broader context in which, among other things,
people came to understand the importance of Vincent Van Gogh and his achievements.
Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, but from a very early age, moved with his family
to Lima in Peru. After returning to France in his teens, he then joined the merchant navy
as a sailor. On his return to Paris, he didn't turn to art immediately, but actually had a very
successful career as a banker and then really discovered his inner calling to be an artist.
Paul Gauguin was growing increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned with the urban world in Paris
and wanted to find a simpler way of life, and so he moved to Brittany and the artists
communities of Pont-Aven, and later on in Le Pouldu, where he found a much deeper,
mystical sense of Catholicism, where the Celtic traditions were still very, very present.
'Vision of the Sermon' is one of Paul Gauguin's most ambitious and sort of fully realised.
works in this period in Brittany, and really shows his departure from natural representation
into a world which is much more representing one's visions and one's dreams. It's a work
that is astonishingly bold, with this sort of bright field of red colour bisected in
the middle by a tree. And what Gauguin is trying to do here is to put himself almost
on an equal footing with the priest himself and say, look, a priest using religious fervour has
a way of bringing a mystical image and give it a reality into people's mind,
and the artist is able to give the same sort of sense of reality to that vision.
When Paul Gauguin arrives in Tahiti in 1891, the island he discovers doesn't
correspond to this great European myth. Polynesian culture still exists,
but has been heavily eradicated by a 100 years of Christianity and colonial presence.
Gauguin, off in the South Seas, nonetheless knew that Van Gogh's fame after his death was
growing exponentially. Throughout the 1890s and around 1900, the role of Van Gogh in his
imagination only grew more important. In fact, in Tahiti, he asked a friend to send sunflower seeds,
which he planted, and then painted his own sunflower paintings in the South Seas,
a kind of evocation of Vincent and a statement of his debt to him.
The three great artists that we are focusing on at the beginning of the exhibition obviously cast
very long shadows on the next generation of artists. And one group in particular who was
acutely aware of particularly Gauguin, are called the Nabis, i.e. prophets,
and they believed that they were really bearing the banner
for the lesson that had been learnt of the radical way of treating non-naturalism,
which had been learnt from Gauguin. And the person who carried that, with a work called 'The Talisman',
which was, if you like, the manifesto for the movement, was Paul Sérusier, and he had had a
lesson directly given to him by Gauguin when he'd been in Brittany in the summer of 1888.
Well, Gauguin's impact took time to establish itself - people don't
understand his work. It wasn't really, in a sense, until after his death,
and his first big retrospective exhibition in 1903, that his fame really started to grow.
From the 1890s, Cézanne's reputation begins to grow through exhibitions which are held
not just in Paris, both during his lifetime and immediately after his death in 1906,
but also as far afield as Brussels, Berlin, Vienna. And, by the time we get to 1912,
in a great exhibition which celebrates modern art's achievements across Europe,
where he is given a leading role as one of the fathers of new art.
A very few months after Van Gogh killed himself, his brother Theo also died. His wife Johanna
suddenly found herself with thousands of works of art by a brother-in-law she hardly knew,
and she took it upon herself to begin to show Vincent's works across Europe,
not only in Paris, but in Brussels, in Amsterdam, in Vienna, etc. Around 1900,
you see German artists really identifying Van Gogh as the key figure of modernism,
and his influence in German art takes off from then, from almost exactly 1900.
One of the characteristics of European avant-garde art at that moment was
the grouping together of artists into collectives, mounting their own exhibitions,
communicating with one another across Europe, the secessions in the German-speaking world,
the world of art in Russia, all of these collectives where ideas
and images were exchanged. We imagine travel was more difficult back then, but it is
extraordinary to realise how much avant-garde art was traveling across Europe all the time.
Looking back on this extraordinary period in the history of art, you would be amazed
at the journeys that had been taken by artists during a relatively short period of time. But,
then on the other hand, I think that because they released themselves from the constraints
of traditional representation, it allowed them the freedom to explore,
to take risks, to experiment in a way that had not really been so consistently there before.
When you walk through the exhibition, you find that the artists throughout this period are as
much concerned with how paint is put onto the surface of the canvas, how form is defined,
and the technique that is used, so that you look carefully at the surface of the work,
rather than what it is describing. And that really balances the relationship between what
a work of art is there to do, tell you about the external world, and what the work of art can tell
you about how the artist interprets what it is that they think they ought to be doing.
And it becomes a very individual decision. If you are visiting the exhibition,
you will find yourself increasingly encouraged to look carefully at how these things were made,
how carefully they were thought through, rather than merely what they describe.
One of the things I find so exciting about this exhibition is that it is a period I,
and many of us, thought we knew, and yet going back into it, looking at it from a
new perspective, it's coming alive in a new way. We see it as a period even more
complex than we had suspected, even more innovative than we had imagined.
So it's putting a new understanding on what is the key moment of art in our modern world.