They were rebellious and often shunned for the radical and subversive way in which they were reinventing not only art but the very way we saw the world. At the end of the 19th century, a handful of artists freed themselves from the direct representation of reality in search of deeper truths, even within themselves. Those young people, today turned into still challenging superstars, with Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin spearheading those who were followed by Munch, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, Degas, Klimt…, meet again in a superb exhibition at the National Gallery in London that wants to put an end to the myth that gives the Post-Impressionists an intermediate role between Manet and Picasso, as if they were just another step on the road to revolution and not the revolution itself.
In one of the After Impressionism rooms. The invention of modern art, a car out of a deep dark night rushes towards the viewer with its dazzling headlights. It is driven by a woman whose absent-minded and confident smile betrays her determination to leave it all behind and start a new beginning. The curator MaryAnne Stevens discovered the painting by Ramon Casas, The Automobile, in the Cercle del Liceu, from where it had not moved since 1902, only for the eyes of members and companions, and has placed it at the center of an exhibition that, as the headlights of the old Renault (one of the first to circulate in Barcelona), permanently illuminate from the past towards the new future. “We had never lent it before, but this is an exceptional opportunity to project Houses in the world,” says José García Reyes, who accompanied the painting as courier.
The automobile is one of the protagonists of the chapter that the exhibition dedicates to Barcelona as the center of a modernity that had its maximum boiling point in Paris, but in which cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Brussels also participated. “When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it, it seemed incredible to me,” says Stevens, one of whose main interests, and achievements, as a curator is that works that are in private collections can be put into the public domain. Casas is accompanied by Anglada Camarasa (El pavo blanco ), a Nonell from the MNAC (Miseria , in which theme and brushstrokes merge) or the portrait that Santiago Rusiñol made of the former director of La Vanguardia Modesto Sánchez Ortiz (in the collections of the Cau Ferrat), to whom he sent his chronicles from Paris and who anticipates Picasso’s blue period by five years, whom we almost see mutate live -he will do so many times along the way- in a two-sided painting from 1901 : on the one hand, the portrait of a woman in a theater box, a subject popularized by the impressionists; on the other, The Absinthe Drinker. His friend Casagemas has committed suicide and the palette becomes much darker: the blue stage begins.
The radical and dazzling journey begins with Cézanne, for many the true father of modern art, Gauguin and Van Gogh. But everywhere you look there are beautiful and enduring works. And this despite the fact that, as Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, recalled yesterday, the war in Ukraine abruptly ended the alliance with the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which had to provide significant loans.
It begins with Cézanne’s The Large Bathers and ends with cubism and the beginning of the abstraction of Kandiski and Mondrian, which Degas had already intuited long before in La mujer le going. Along the way, unexpected encounters such as George Minne’s sculpture The Kneeling Fountain of Youth, the enigmatic The Amazement of Ensor’s Mask or the moving Munch’s Deathbed, all the pain over the death of his sister. And perhaps because the patriarchy of art never said that women cannot be artists, but rather that they cannot be great artists, there is a greater selection of models than painters: only five, including Paula Modersohn-Becker, the first to take a nude self-portrait .
