This is a lavish and deeply enjoyable exhibition portraying the great explosion of creativity in West European painting which took place in the decades between the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Critics then and now struggled to find a blanket term for the period, as Belinda Thompson explains in her excellent survey of the period, ‘The Post-Impressionists’. The term ‘post-impressionism’ persists because the only thing all these different artists had in common was that they were painting after the great Impressionist breakthrough of the 1860s and 1870s and were clearly influenced by it. Beyond that it’s difficult to generalise, except that they were all experimenting and innovating and following through on the countless possibilities inherent in the act of putting oil paint on canvas.

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne (1902 to 1906) © Philadelphia Museum of Art

Structure

The exhibition structure is simple: it opens by celebrating the artists who have emerged, in retrospect, as the great gods of the period – Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin – and then examines the influence they had on the younger generations of artists, in the hotbed of modern art, Paris.

Where this exhibition strikes out and is distinctive from many surveys of the period is that it then makes a conscious effort to broaden its scope, geographically, with rooms or sections dedicated to other capital cities where exciting experimentation was taking place, namely Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna. The curators point out that there was more cross-fertilisation than ever before due to the steadily increasing numbers of exhibitions and exhibiting societies, illustrated periodicals and commercial dealerships.

For once there isn’t a particularly strong central thread or thesis being propounded in the show, just a lot of wall labels describing art movements and groups and trends in all these different places, and then picture captions going into detail on individual works.

The show is, therefore, in effect, just a feast of fabulous post-impressionist masterpieces, and strolling through it is a quite wonderful, mind-blowing, eye-filling experience.

Specific movements are mentioned along the way (the Nabis, Symbolism, Die Brücke, the Fauves), in passing, but towards the end the show crystallises, as it were, presenting examples of the radical Modernism which supplanted what had come before in the form of works by Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.

What characterised post-impressionist art?

Impressionism began the movement away from traditional Salon art which a) depicted high historical or mythological subject matter or b) monumental nudes in c) an intensely figurative realistic manner. Instead the Impressionists were interested not in what was there, but in what we see, which is a different thing, trying to capture the shimmer and play of light.

The post-impressionists continued this departure from the conventional representation of the external world. In a host of different ways they developed non-naturalist visual languages, emphasising shape or pattern or colour which don’t exist in the real world. Some of them were interested in line and form, some became obsessed with colour, some with pattern bringing out the decorative potential of art, some focused on symbols and meanings. Once you walked away from the idea of figurative, realistic depiction of the ‘real world’ a thousand doors opened.

All this was helped by the swift development of photography, with many artists realising that their traditional role as makers of portraits, recorders of events, annotaters of landscapes was being superseded by the new technology. But this was entirely positive: it freed them up to explore the expressive potential of paint on flat surfaces in a thousand new ways.

Artists

With almost 100 works, many lent from institutions abroad and seen in London for the first time, the show features a host of big name artists like Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch. It’s mostly paintings  but there’s a selection of ten or so sculptures carefully chosen to demonstrate innovation in that medium, too (notable sculptures by Rodin, Gauguin and Kollwitz).

I’m going to list the rooms, indicate what they contain i.e. which movements and artists, and then pick personal highlights.

Introduction

The introductory room contains just four works, a painting each by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Cezanne, framed by two sculptures by Auguste Rodin (‘Monument to Balzac‘, 1898, and ‘Walking man‘, 1907). Cezanne’s ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ (1906) is obviously a greatest hit but after the recent Cezanne exhibitions at Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery I’m a bit Cézanned out. The Rodin pieces confirm my very strong dislike; I object to because of the lumbering clumsy size of his works and the crude, horrible unfinished nature. In terms of modern sculpture I like Epstein, Gill and Gaudier-Brzeska, small, smooth, beautiful lines and angles, the opposite of everything Rodin stands for.

Therefore I preferred the Puvis work, ‘The Sacred Grove’ from 1885, although this struck me as a very odd choice, because its idyllic classical setting, figurative approach, use of perspective etc seem completely contrary to everything which follows.

The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1884) Art Institute of Chicago

Room 2: Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin

Greatest hits from some of Western art’s biggest names. Cezanne is represented by a classic version of The Bathers (1905) where he is transforming human figures, trees and landscape into geometric shapes, leaning rectangles of paint, the semi-abstract human figures having blank masks. You can clearly see the origins of Picasso and Braque’s cubism. A still life of a sugar bowl and apples, plus another of his numerous views of Mont Saint-Victoire.

There are 4 works by Van Gogh: ‘Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet)‘ (1890) had the classic van Gogh wavy paint, as did ‘Sunset at Montmajour‘ and ‘Enclosed field with ploughman‘. But I found myself more drawn to ‘Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer’. Apparently the tight, constricted feel of the composition is a new thing in his style. It was painted in the south of France where the bright light made him realise he could exaggerate colour effects even more than he’d been doing previously.

Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer by Vincent van Gogh (1890)

An oddity I noticed is that the National Gallery itself owns some outstanding van Gogh masterpieces, such as the chair, and sunflowers and these aren’t in the exhibition. The only reason I can think of is that they’re part of the permanent collection which tourists quite possibly come to London to see and so the curators took the decision to exclude them from the exhibition and keep them on general display.

The caption to his ‘Woman from Arles’, a portrait of the owner of the Café de la Gare in Arles, raises an interesting point. Apparently, when they were sharing a house in the south of France, Gauguin and van Gogh had an ongoing argument about the nature of art: Gauguin argued that the artists is like a priest questing for the spiritual essence of a subject and therefore it was best to paint from memory, distance from the actual object freeing the artist to bring out the essential shapes and colours. Van Gogh, on the contrary, argued it is the artist’s sacred duty to paint what they see, as they see it.

No such scruples with the little selection of Degas works, the biggest example of which is the famous ‘Combing the Hair (Le Coiffure)’, an orgy of reds and oranges. It’s accompanied by a good example of his ballet dancers, ‘Dancers practicing in the foyer’. But my favourite piece was a small but exquisite piece, ‘Woman reading’ (1885).

Femme lisant by Edgar Degas (1883 to 1885)

It’s tightly focused, cropping the figure at the knee. Degas applied layers of pastel over a monotype print

Taken together this room makes a strong case for the dazzling impact these artists had both in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, with their reconsiderations of form, surface and space. The strokes are called ‘gestural’ because they convey the actual strokes by the artists as much as the object. Strong short dark lines make it look as if elements of the image have been stitched together. The use of bold pure colours and highly gestural strokes were very influential on later artists.

Then onto the Gauguin section. I was bowled over. Gauguin strikes me as less covered than Cezanne, van Gogh or Degas, maybe because he is the boldest, most radical, most muscular and controversial of them. He’s represented by a greatest hit, ‘Nevermore’, ‘The Wave’, ‘Fête Gloanec’, ‘The Wave’, ‘The Wine Harvest’ and his expressive ‘primitive’ carving in the circular shape of a totem, ‘The afternoon of a faun’. But it was the huge and amazing ‘Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)’ which bowled me over.

Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin (1888) © National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

As per the explanation on the van Gogh caption, you can see how Gauguin has taken real elements, such as peasant women from his native Brittany, a cow, a tree, but placed them in an abstract ‘symbolic’ landscape where the grass is bright orange and perspective is gestured at but mocked or transcended. And, contrary to all traditional rules, the nominal subject, the wrestling match, doesn’t take place at the front and centre of the painting, but is a strange, obscure, garbled struggle happening off in the middle distance.

Degas is more consistently sensually and visually pleasing, but Gauguin is bracing and weird. He is a godfather of the pictorial Symbolism which was a major strand of the 1890s with its concern for Big (if often nebulous) Ideas and a completely non-naturalistic treatment, both combining to convey a strong if indefinable emotion.

Room 3: Different paths

Side by side are placed dark, heavily outlined depictions of the city, and the tremendously light and airy works of the ‘divisionists’ or ‘pointillists’.

Part of the enjoyment of visiting art exhibitions is to test out my own tastes. Over the years my tastes have changed, and are also liable to vary from day to day depending on mood and circumstance (e.g. pressure of work). Something which appears to remain consistent is I am instantly drawn to works with strong outlines. This is part of the reason I like Gauguin over van Gogh and Degas over Cezanne.

So in this room I really liked the works by Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin with their ‘intensified colour and flattened forms bounded by strong outlines’.

‘Avenue de Clichy: five o’clock in the evening’ by Louis Anquetin (1887)

The strong black lines defining figures or folds of clothes were described by some critics as cloisonné work. According to the curators it anticipates and to some extent influence Gauguin.

By contrast I found the works by pointillists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac pallid and limp. These were ‘Setting sun: sardine fishing’ and ‘Bertaud’s Pine’ by Signac, alongside ‘By the Mediterranean by Henri-Edmond Cross. I know they’re great works in their own right. I understand that they called themselves Neo-Impressionists because they saw themselves as applying ‘scientific’ rigour and analysis to the depiction of sunlight and shade. I appreciate that the pointillists were, surprisingly, associated with workers’ rights and socialism and thought of themselves as depicting a better lighter world for all. But it’s the dark urban night-time visions of Louis Anquetin which pull my daisy.

The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe by Georges Seurat (1890) © National Gallery, London

Room 4:The Nabis

Beside them are two works showing the highly stylised approach of Toulouse Lautrec, ‘Tristan Bernard at the Vêlodrome Buffalo‘ and ‘The Reader‘. The room contains a partitioned-off section about the Nabis or ‘prophets’. According to Wikipedia, the Nabis were:

a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. They included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Auguste Cazalis.

The show includes what is commonly thought to be the first ‘Nabis’ painting, ‘Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven or Le Talisman’ of 1888 by Paul Sérusier. You can see why it was widely felt to have pushed painting significantly beyond figurativism into an entirely new place where colour and pattern became the main aim of a painting. Serusier painted it under the supervision and direct encouragement of Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany. This fact and the almost complete abstraction of the work itself had a dramatic impact on his friends back in Paris and helped crystallise the new movement.

‘Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven or Le Talisman’ by Paul Sérusier (1888)

And so the show includes comparable works by other members of the Nabis, including ‘Island and village of Le Pecq‘ and ‘The evening wash by lamplight‘ by Maurice Denis. Nearby there’s a work by Pierre Bonnard, ‘Madame Claude Terrasse and her son Charles‘ (1893). I went to the Bonnard exhibition at Tate Modern back in 2019 and, eventually, overcome my initial dislike to sort of ‘get’ his messy way with colour and pattern but this specimen epitomised that lack of draughtsmanship which I find hard to overcome. Next to it are two pieces by Edouard Vuillard, ‘Figures in an interior: Music‘ (1896), ‘Lugny-Poe‘ (1891) and ‘Lady of Fashion‘ (1892), both of which highlight his interest in pattern and design over strict realism. No likee.

Room 5: New voices – Barcelona and Brussels

By my count there were 6 paintings from Barcelona and 5 from Brussels.

Barcelona

Barcelona is represented by works by Hermenglido Anglada-Camaras, Ramon Casas i Carbo, Santiago Rusiñol I Prats, Isidro Nonell i Monturio and Pablo Picasso. The exhibition goes heavy on the enormous painting by Casas i Carbo, ‘The Automobile’.

The Automobile by Ramón Casas i Carbó (about 1900) © Círculo del Liceo / photo Fotogasull

It’s imposingly big and has a long backstory. Casas, a leading figure in the Barcelona avant-garde, was commissioned to the series of 12 paintings for the private club, Círculo del Liceu in Barcelona, depicting modern musical life. In this one a woman dressed in modern (1900) clothes drives that amazing new invention, the automobile. Casas was one of the first in the city to own a motor car and, of course, the curators point out how ‘radical’ it was to depict a woman driving one. The link to ‘music’? She’s meant to be driving to or from a concert. You can see it in the background on the right. The bold simplicity of the design is said to represent ‘Catalan Modernism’ and to have impressed the young Picasso.

Picasso is represented by an early work, ‘The absinthe drinker‘ and a portrait of ‘Gustave Coquiot‘, Hermenglido Anglada-Camaras by ‘The White Peacock‘ (1904), Isidre Nonell by a tough naturalistic depiction of poverty titled ‘Hardship‘. But I particularly liked the portrait of Modesto Sanchez Ortiz by Santiago Rusiñol, not particularly radical or modernist but just very powerful. Ortiz’ eyes followed me round the room.

Brussels

As to Brussels, the curators tell us it was home to progressive exhibiting societies like The Twenty and The Free Aesthetic which fostered close links with the Paris avant-garde. The Twenty was an exhibition society founded in 1883 by 20 artists who wanted to break away from the conventional art establishment. It was in Brussels that van Gogh made his only sale during his lifetime. The five pieces felt very light and pointillist. They include the decorative and soothing ‘The Scheldt upstream from Antwerp‘ by Theo van Rysselberghe (1892), the political motive behind ‘The eve of the strike‘ by Jan Toorop (1889), and a strikingly pointillist work, ‘Going to church’ by Henry van de Velde (1892). As you can see, although pointillist in technique, it has a much darker, gloomier vibe than the sun-drenched works of Signac and Seurat.

Woman in front of the Church by Henry Van de Velde (1889)

Off in a corner is a single work by the outlier James Ensor, ‘Astonishment of the Mask Wouse‘ (1889). As you can see, Ensor’s art goes beyond satire into the weird and the grotesque.

Room 6: New voices – Vienna and Berlin

In both Vienna and Berlin at the start of the 20th century artists withdrew from the traditional art academies and salon exhibitions and set up breakaway organisations, the Secessions.

Vienna

Dominating the left side of the room are two huge portraits of women by Gustav Klimt in his trademark style, combining a highly realistic sensual face with a luscious depiction of stylised dress and fabric: ‘Hermine Gallia (1904) and ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer II‘ (1912). I loved Klimt when I first discovered him at school but move quickly on to prefer his disciple Egon Schiele and eventually found him too sweet and chocolate box. Also from Vienna is ‘The Artist’s Mother‘ by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1907).

Surprisingly, there are some works by Norwegian depressive Edvard Munch. Why? Because Munch actually exhibited and sold his works in Berlin. The works here show a healthy lack of interest in traditional perspective and preference for pattern and design, but aren’t particularly impressive: ‘Consul Christen Sandberg‘. More characteristic is ‘The death bed‘ (1896). I was interested to learn that Munch eventually had a complete nervous breakdown (in 1908) and that, when he returned to painting, it was in a far looser style and of relatively unemotional landscapes: ‘Cabbage field‘ (1915).

Berlin

I was surprised by this room because so many of the works seemed the opposite of ‘modern’ but surprisingly old fashioned. Thus the two works by Lovis Corinth are, maybe, a bit candid and honest about the female body but they are, nonetheless, female nudes in the time-honoured tradition, without a hint of the stylisation we’ve seen throughout the show up to this point: ‘Perseus and Andromeda‘ (1900).

Nana by Lovis Corinth (1911) St Louis Art Museum

There’s a portrait of historian and philosopher George Brandes by Max Liebermann (1901) and ‘Danae‘ (1895) where I really admired the frank peasant ugliness of the servant, and ‘Children by the Pond: The Garden in Godramstein‘ (1909) by Max Slevogt.

I was surprised by this entire room because it all seemed so reactionary and old fashioned. A glimmer of modernism was given by the sole piece by the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz, not a painting but a tightly conceived sculpture, ‘Pair of Lovers‘ from 1913 to 1915. I’m a huge fan.

Room 7: German Expressionism

The penultimate room is a small one tucked off to the side of the flow of big rooms but it came to me as a huge relief after the retro kitsch of the previous room, a sudden burst of vibrant colour and exciting non-conformity.

Why stick to traditional methods of compositions? Why not use blaring flagrant primary colours! Why bother to cover the whole canvas when leaving blank spots creates a sense of urgency and drama! Bang!!

Many of the works are by members of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. What they had in common was interest in primitivist art and expressing extreme emotion through high-keyed colours that were non-naturalistic. God, this is the dog’s bollocks, I thought, what a relief after the stodgy naturalism of the previous room!

Here are splendidly bold and unfettered works by Erich Heckel – ‘The house in Dangast‘ (1908) – and Karl Schmitt-Rottluf – ‘Break in the dyke‘) (1910). I loved Sonia Delaunay’s ‘Jeune Finlandaise’ (1907). In this small room experienced a physical sense of liberation.  This is the real McCoy.

Young Finnish woman by Sonia Delaunay (1907)

It’s significant that this painting captures Delauney on her journey towards pure abstraction which she would achieve a few year later. Part of the thrill of paintings like this is you can feel the future in them, ready to burst through. In the same vein is the National Gallery’s portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt by Max Pechstein (1910).

Two outliers are a portrait by Henri Rousseau (‘Joseph Brum’), whose ‘naive’ self-taught style became very popular in turn of the century Paris where ‘primitivism’ of all kinds was becoming fashionable.

And, off to one, side, the eerie and disturbing ‘Seated girl with a white shirt and standing nude girl’ by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906).

8: New Terrains

Finally the exhibition closes with a big room drawing together strands which have emerged during the exhibition to date, and pointing forwards to the radical ruptures of Modernism.

Thus there’s a work by Wassily Kandinsky which is well on the way of his journey towards abstraction – ‘Bavarian Village with Field‘ (1908).

There are three paintings by Matisse, highlighting his move towards decoration, colour and pattern:

• Interior with a young girl reading (1905)
• The Riverbank (1907)
• Greta Moll (1908)

There are three little works by Piet Mondrian which neatly capture his progression from traditional figurativism in a realistic depiction of a tree by a river bank; to a half-way house, a tree painted in a style influenced by van Gogh’s broad brushstrokes; and finally onto pure abstraction:

• Isolated tree on the Gein I
• Tree (1908)
• Composition XVI: trees (1912)

In a similar spirit there are four Picassos which capture his progression from deliberate ‘primitivism’ of 1907 on to the invention of cubism in 1911:

• Nude combing her hair (1906)
• [The castle at La Roche-Guyon by Georges Braque (1909)]
• Woman with Pears (1909)
• Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde (1910)

But dominating the room is the enormous work ‘The Dance’ by André Derain. Derain was one of the group of Parisian artists who, in a review of a 1905 exhibition, were mockingly called ‘les Fauves’ (which simply means ‘the wild things’) by a Parisian critic and adopted the name as a badge of pride. Other works by Derain are included:

• Madame Matisse in a kimono (1905)
• L’Estaque (1906)

But it’s ‘The Dance’ which dominates the entire room and is your lasting, lingering visual image of it. Wild, high-toned colours, a cheerful disregard for perspective and, in this image in particular, a complete transition to fantasy, fairy-tale, exotic subject matter.

‘The Dance’ by André Derain (1906) Private Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023

It’s funny but, although the curators started out by claiming there was a great explosion of styles and approaches from the late 1880s onwards, the works chosen for this final room suggest that all along there were in fact just two threads or streams or approaches.

For me the drab colouring and obsessive interest in volumes, hard-edged angles, facets and geometry found in the cubism of Picasso and Braque relates directly back to the exploration of volumes, forms, rectangles and blocks developed by Cézanne. Maybe we can call this the Analytic tradition and define it as stretching from (on one wing) the scientific approach of the Neo-Impressionists and, on the other, the pure, geometric abstraction of Mondrian.

Whereas the wild children’s drawing of brightly coloured figures dancing in the jungle obviously comes from a completely different place, clearly relates directly back to Gauguin’s symbolic exoticism. Maybe we could call this the Expressive tradition. Obviously, it incorporates, in Germany, the Bridge artists who we saw in the previous room, and includes the other Fauves, besides Derain.

Analytical versus expressive. Composition versus colour. Well, that’s the neat and simple pattern which struck me as I came to the end of this brilliant, exhilarating exhibition.

Related links

• After Impressionism continues at the National Gallery until 13 August 2023

Related reviews

• The Post-Impressionists by Belinda Thompson (2nd edition 1990)
• Gauguin Portraits @ the National Gallery (December 2019)

Nineteenth century France reviews

• Nineteenth century France reviews

More National Gallery reviews

• More National Gallery reviews