VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA.- The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presents "Post-Impressionist Masterworks from the National Gallery of Canada," on view through March 2, 2003. The Post-Impressionist Masterworks exhibition is the most prestigious and valuable art exhibition to come to Victoria – its only BC destination. The exhibition consists of vibrant, original works, including those of Cézanne, Matisse, van Gogh, and Gauguin. It will be supplemented by a second exhibition of works on paper by some of the same artists and their contemporaries chosen from the Art Gallery’s own collection. The exhibition will also have extensive educational programming.
The exhibition comprises 15 exquisite paintings by the most celebrated artists of the period, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy. The works span a period of four decades, beginning in 1886, when the eight and final Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris.
The survey begins with two radiant still-lifes: van Gogh’s Bowl with Summer Flowers, painted in 1886 just weeks after he had arrived in Paris and Gauguin’s jewel-like Still-life, from the artist’s Pont-Aven years. Cézanne, who bridged the gap between the Impressionists and the new generation, is represented with two stunning compositions, the imposing Portrait of a Peasant and the proto-Cubist landscape Forest, both painted around the turn of the century. Also included are the distinctive landscapes of Sérusier, Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Albert Marquet, a luminous port scene by Bonnard, and figurative works by Maurice Denis, Kees van Dongen, and Maurice Prendergast, one of the first American painters to succumb to French influences. The Old Bedford by Walter Sickert, a close friend of Edgar Degas, illustrates the British reaction to continental trends. Crowning the group is the splendid Nude on a Yellow Sofa by Matisse, the leader of the Fauves and master of impulsive color and line.
Following the success of the tour of Impressionists Masterworks from the National Gallery of Canada, presented in Quebec City last winter, this exhibition will be circulated to six Canadian cities to host the exhibition. In the province of Québec, the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke was chosen to inaugurate the tour, a mark of confidence that should make citizens of the New
Sherbrooke proud. After the Sherbrooke venue, the masterworks will travel to Victoria, Edmonton, Halifax, London and Winnipeg.
A short history of an art movement.
When the art critic Roger Fry organized the first of two important exhibitions of modern painters held at the Grafton Galleries in London between 1910 and 1913, he searched for a way to describe the generation of avant-garde artists coming after the Impressionists. Surveying the list of works that represented a wide range of contemporary movements and developments, including the Pont-Aven circle, the Nabis, the Neo-Impressionists, Symbolists, the Fauves and early cubists, as well as several members of the Impressionists group, Fry came up with the term ‘Post-Impressionist’. More than anything it was a catch-all phrase used to characterize the various trends and personalities that had dominated the last decade of the 19th century and first years of the next.
The fact that this description incorporated the name of the movement that had eclipsed the Parisian art world of the 1870s and early 1880s acknowledged the impact of Impressionism on the following generation. But it also signaled a break with the past, presenting a fresh agenda and new mode of representational painting. These artists endeavored to produce art of a more permanent, structured, and, most of all, a more expressive nature. Their tools included arbitrary color, liberated forms and perspectives, and the beginning of modern abstraction. The geographical boundaries for this artistic development had also expanded, reaching beyond France to other European countries, including Great Britain, as well as to North America.
