This exhibition showcases two important developments in classical modern art. The first is the transition from realistic painting rooted in the nineteenth-century academic tradition to a much freer approach, which began with looser handling that moved away from the wholly realistic depiction of the world and was later stylized until the art became virtually abstract.
The second strand in the exhibition is the increasing industrialization and urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century. The landscape in art was transformed from a pastoral setting in which religious or mythological events happen into a place where the modern age announced its coming in steam trains, factories and broad avenues in metropolises like Paris and New York. Cities where cafés, cabarets and theatres catered for a bustling nightlife, with its attendant evils of drunkenness and prostitution. These developments are represented in six strands by masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection of classical modern art and by a selection from the museum’s eclectic collection of works on paper. Never before has the museum’s collection provided this kind of overview of the development of classical modern art.
1. Barbizon and 'Plein Air'
The nineteenth century witnessed a number of radical changes. The rise of industrialization and urbanization changed the relationship between people and landscape, and technological developments – the advances in photography (from around 1839), film (around 1895) , the mass-production of paint in tubes (in the eighteen-forties) and the invention of the easily portable outdoor easel – changed the relationship between artists and their subjects. In the eighteen-thirties, artists increasingly went outdoors to work from nature. Not that their predecessors had not done so too, but they usually made sketches in charcoal or chalk, or small oil sketches the size of the inside of a painter’s box, using paint they had made themselves, carried in a pig’s bladder.
The painters of the Barbizon School, named after a village near Paris close to the forests of Fontainebleau, increasingly favoured a direct record of nature and no longer wanted to idealize reality as the Romantics had done. In this strand we show landscapes and seascapes by artists including Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, Charles-François Daubigny and Johan Bartold Jongkind.
2. Impressionism
The Barbizon School painters were important trailblazers for the generation that followed – artists who really shook painting reality to its core. The furore caused by Claude Monet’s 'Impression, Sunrise' (1872) is a familiar story. He showed the work at the Salon des Réfusés, the exhibition of works refused admittance to the regular Paris Salon that had been introduced by Napoleon III. Critics scrambled over one another in their haste to condemn the loose, sketchy painting style, denouncing the work as unfinished and calling the artists who painted in this way the Impressionists. It was intended as an insult, but the painters themselves soon embraced the name.
Not concerned with a faithful reproduction of reality, they wanted to capture the moment. They were inspired by the effect of the sunlight and the weather conditions on the atmosphere and colour of a landscape, cityscape or seascape and tailored their palette to it. The landscape is suggested in rapid strokes made with a brush and palette knife, with occasional signs of modernity in the form of factory chimneys or a steam train. In this strand, works by Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro show the Impressionist landscape and country life in the eighteen-eighties.
3. The Hague School – Dutch Impressionism
In the Netherlands a more tonal variant of Impressionism developed, influenced by the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. It became known as the Hague School. Analogous to the Barbizon School, it was so called because many of the painters, among them Hendrik Willem Mesdag, worked in and around The Hague. The countryside around Oosterbeek near Arnhem was also an important source of inspiration for such artists as the brothers Jacob, Willem and Matthijs Maris. Artists of the Hague School painted subjects inspired by the Romantics, such as Scheveningen’s hard-working community of fishermen, but like Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch they also headed into the Dutch polders.
Low horizons with cloudy skies occupying most of the space are typical of Hague School paintings – in common with their French counterparts, light played an essential role. This wide-ranging selection of work by Dutch Impressionists includes an early painting by Vincent van Gogh, 'Poplar Avenue near Nuenen' (1885), which dates from the time when he was still influenced by Anton Mauve and others. George Hendrik Breitner, by contrast, focused on urban life in Amsterdam and used photography to create unusual perspectives and – sometimes cropped – compositions.
4. Post-Impressionism
At the end of the nineteenth century, a number of artists reacted critically to the Impressionists. They rejected the casualness of their works and tried to approach painting more scientifically, for example with a method based on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Charles Blanc. Emulating Georges Seurat, Paul Signac developed a painting style that came to be known as Pointillism or Divisionism – a style in which tiny contrasting coloured dots are placed close together and the eye converts them into a logical image. Post-Impressionism is a less well-defined concept than Impressionism.
Post-Impressionism embraced a variety of trends in modern art, including Fauvism, which includes works by Kees van Dongen and Jan Sluijters, and was the breeding ground for Symbolism. The museum has a couple of small, tranquil, stylized landscapes by Odilon Redon, renowned for his Symbolist work.
5. City life
In the nineteenth century, urban development boomed; many people were attracted to the towns and cities in search of work, homes and entertainment. Most factories were located in and around towns. Technological developments followed one another in rapid succession – trams, metros, street lighting and electricity. The increased activity and growing population gave rise to a bustling night life of cafés, theatres, cabarets and music halls, captured by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. Artists commented on urbanization, the emerging bourgeois class, which savoured the night life of a city like Paris, and the hidden, dark sides of a large city: prostitution, slums and corruption.
This strand showcases a selection of works on paper by artists ranging from Edouard Vuillard, with colour lithographs of elegant Parisian boulevards, and drawings of dancers by Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin to Kees van Dongen, who captured Rotterdam’s Red Light District around Zandstraat in drawings.
6. The Road to Abstraction
The final strand heralds the road to Abstraction. The link with reality is still evident in most of the works exhibited – something that the supreme Dutch Modernist, Piet Mondrian, strongly rejected in the oeuvre of a Cubist like Picasso. To Mondrian, total abstraction was the ultimate objective of all art. The focus of Modernist artists differed in regard to the urban landscape. Cubists like Jacoba van Heemskerk, a pupil of Piet Mondrian’s, and Maurice De Vlaminck, used the landscape – urban as well as rural – as a source for the process of abstraction. The basis of this strand is the work of Paul Cézanne, who gave the initial impetus to the stylization and abstraction of the landscape in his watercolours and paintings.
His pioneering approach to reality had a major influence on other artists. The exhibition ends with two developments on the road to abstraction – the more geometrical abstraction of Van Heemskerck and Mondrian and the lyrical abstraction of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. These artists stylized shapes from nature, reflected on the modern age and launched a new era with their art. The concluding work in the exhibition, Mondrian’s 'Composition no II', was the overture to the future, marking a move from painting that no longer referenced the urban or natural landscape to neoplasticism.
Note: Works on paper can change due to lux restrictions because of previous presentations.
Want to know more?
Sandra Tatsakis Director Touring Exhibitions T + 31 (0)10 44 19 421 tatsakis@boijmans.nl
