Prior instructions to read this article before casting off. Bundle up and take a good raincoat, anti-sickness pills and sunscreen because winter (this season that no longer exists) is coming to an end. Get ready, vibrant waves are coming and full of beautiful foam of the days.
In 1896, the excellent neo-impressionist painter Paug Signac invited his colleague Théophile Théo van Rysselberghe to sail a barge through the Midi Canal and tour the Mediterranean. There have been historical invitations for collaboration between great artists, such as that of Van Gogh with Gauguin in Arles, which ended like the rosary of dawn.
The journey of Signac and the Belgian artist was one of the most fruitful, groundbreaking and beautiful in the history of art who discovered a Saint-Tropez that did not appear on the maps, captured the light of Antibes, painted a thousand seas, enjoyed that decadence that catches in Venice, toured the Bosphorus, and licked every corner of Istanbul.
More than a century later his work, coming from museums such as the Orsay or the Pompidou, later arrives in Athens in an impressive exhibition that does not deserve to go unnoticed and that includes other greats of the neorealist family (small but well-ventilated) such as Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce (the hard core), plus Henri Manguin, Louis Valtat and a certain Henri Matisse.
The Basil Foundation
In their adventure to discover new landscapes, that 1896 trip and others that followed, they laid the foundations not only for Neo-Impressionism, leaving behind the great masters, from Monet to Van Gogh, and inflating the sails for a more daring bet that the Fauves championed. and which Matisse and André Dérain later elevated to infinity.
The exhibition is so beautiful that it manages to create a bubble in which nothing else exists, only the beauty of admiring the fabrics, the prodigious techniques, the lace play of light and the primal vision of landscapes never before painted.
“When I see a painting by Signac, a painterly emotion comes to me. I get closer and then I move away and I see that combination of tones that are happy and charming and that only he knows how to do,” Henri-Edmond Cross wrote to Rysselberghe in 1905.
The Belgian painter portrayed Signac, jugular and femoral of the neo-impressionist movement, with walrus mustaches bathed in saltpeter, a sailor’s cap and an Olympia shank. Athens had to be the destination of this exquisite exhibition. The Greek capital may not be the new Berlin as some claim, but artistically it is clearly back.
Like Gauguin and his followers before, especially Émile Bernard, the pointillist and neorealist painters with short and unusual brushstrokes sought absolute originality, nudity, freedom, detaching themselves from any previous convention, they navigated, explored, fell and got up.
“You say ‘let’s free ourselves’, let’s be free, let’s take your ideas to the extreme. Why paint the landscape, the people, the animals, the sky? To create a new harmony? Why not abandon that old prejudice and trace curves, geometric shapes and meaningless shadows? It could be very pleasing to the eye, but if we did it, would we be entering into the unknown? Rysselberghe writes to Paul Signac on December 29, 1902. The neorealists surely deserve more credit than they get. Rysselberghe, too.
The exhibition reveals a virgin Saint-Tropez. Signac paints the Plaza Des Luces and the fountain with two women filling their water jugs with magnetic light and silence. Edward Luce chooses the port, with its fishermen, merchants, popular people who come and go… a priceless document of what the city is no longer in any way.
Rysselberghe composes a painting as if made of confetti with ten shades of blue that is one of the most admirable paintings of the beginning of the 20th century. Henri-Edmond Cross, in the ideological but not aesthetic line of Van Gogh or Caillebotte before them and Corot and Millet before them, exalts the farmer, his efforts, the woman who carries a very heavy cloud of straw on her shoulders. she.
There is no symbolism, there is no bucolicism in the fabrics. There is respect for the land and those who work it. I respect the sea and those who risk going out fishing. If you don’t have time to go to Athens to see this flag exhibition, we hope you like this chronicle and its images.
If by chance you could go, forget about the siren songs (beautiful and respectable) of other great museums because this is an exhibition that opens the pores, the eyes, the soul, that opens the will to live at least for a while. , while the enchantment lasts. then life, harder or sweeter, continues with a pleasant aftertaste on the retinas.
