MANET TO PICASSO: From The National Gallery

Tuesday, 22 August 2006 15:47

London - The National Gallery’s Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Early Modern works are amongst its most popular paintings.  The rooms in which they currently hang are always full of visitors for whom Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are ‘destination’ pictures.  These are works of such fame and importance that art lovers from around the world make their way to Trafalgar Square to stand in front of them.  On exhibition 22 September 2006 – 20 May 2007.

The National Gallery’s 19^th - century collection, while not large, shows the whole span of the era through works of exceptionally high quality.  Now there is a unique opportunity to re-examine this collection of about one hundred works, when the late 19th- and early 20th- century paintings are displayed afresh in a new Sainsbury Wing installation: Manet to Picasso.

The hang includes familiar favorites alongside important loans.  New juxtapositions challenge audiences to reconsider well-known works, as well as exploring the relationships between major movements and artists.  The six rooms of Manet to Picasso are organized broadly chronologically allowing National Gallery visitors to trace the dramatic changes that occurred during some of the most exciting years of European artistic development.

Painting Modern Life is the subject of the first room.  A highlight is the opportunity to view side by side the recently acquired painting by Adolph Menzel, Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens (the first painting by this German artist to enter a UK collection), with its inspiration, Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens.  There is also a chance to explore Manet’s working methods thanks to the loan of his Study for Music in the Tuileries Gardens (Private Collection).

Room 2 focuses on the work of one of the founding fathers of Impressionism, Claude Monet.  Spanning a 50-year period, iconic works such as Bathers at La Grenouillère and The Water-Lily Pond hang alongside loans including The Japanese Bridge and The Grand Canal, Venice (both Private Collection).  Impressionism is also the theme of the third room, which features several works by Renoir, alongside whom Monet often painted, including his celebrated The Umbrellas and Boating on the Seine.

Two pairs of artists whose desire was to create art beyond the Impressionist techniques are featured in the fourth room.  Seurat developed ‘pointillism’, a technique he began to develop on a massive scale in Bathers at Asnières while Pissarro also experimented with this style (Père Melon sawing Wood, Pontoise - Private Collection).  Both Van Gogh and Cézanne rejected Impressionist techniques in their works such as Van Gogh’s Chair and Avenue at Chantilly, respectively.

Images of dancers, women at their toilette and portraits from across Degas’s career are shown in room 5.  Now, in one space, it is possible to appreciate why he is acclaimed as a master of many techniques.  Degas used various media (oils, pastel, charcoal and pencil) in works including After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself and Beach Scene.  He also used the new skill of photography to help create his compositions.

The final room of Manet to Picasso examines how the changing current of artistic ideas spread across the continent – in France (Toulouse Lautrec, Woman Seated in a Garden), through Spanish artist Picasso (Child with a Dove), on to Denmark (Hammershøi, Interior, Tate, London) and Finland (Gallen-Kallela, Lake Keitele).

The display is accompanied by a new book, Manet to Picasso, focusing upon the highlights of the new hang (£7.95).  There is also a range of short films being shown in the Sainsbury Wing cinema, exploring the work of the artists featured in the display.

Visit The National Gallery at : www.nationalgallery.org.uk/