ARTISTS
Modern masters from the Hermitage
In October 2018 the exhibition Modern masters from the Hermitage opens in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It will present 65 works created between the 1890s and the 1920s. The display devoted to the emergence of Modernism as a phenomenon in cultural history will include paintings by both great artists associated with France, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Kees van Dongen and Maurice de Vlaminck, and their celebrated Russian contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. The exhibition stresses the enduring significance of artists who brought about a revolution in painting at the beginning of the last century. The main section will be devoted to what became a continuation of the movement initiated by the Impressionists, but the few works by Manet, Sisley and Pissarro will serve as a prologue to the discussion about art in the 20th century.
Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck Van Dongen and many others strove to renew art, to liberate it both from copying nature and blind adherence to academic traditions. They formed the earliest avant-garde of the 20th century, which arose in France as a reaction to Impressionism. These artists turned to bright colours, deliberate chromatic contrasts, rough, passionate brushwork, simplified form, light and shade without half-tones and smooth transitions. On seeing the youthful Picasso’s Cubist pictures, Degas said, “Those young people want to do something more difficult than painting.” That memorable comment from the wise old artist expresses the difference between what art was at the time of his own youth and what it had become as a result of the revolution in visual art carried out by the Impressionists, who were mocked, unacknowledged, persecuted, but ultimately victorious.
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In October 2018 the exhibition Modern masters from the Hermitage opens in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It will present 65 works created between the 1890s and the 1920s. The display devoted to the emergence of Modernism as a phenomenon in cultural history will include paintings by both great artists associated with France, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Kees van Dongen and Maurice de Vlaminck, and their celebrated Russian contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. The exhibition stresses the enduring significance of artists who brought about a revolution in painting at the beginning of the last century. The main section will be devoted to what became a continuation of the movement initiated by the Impressionists, but the few works by Manet, Sisley and Pissarro will serve as a prologue to the discussion about art in the 20th century.
Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck Van Dongen and many others strove to renew art, to liberate it both from copying nature and blind adherence to academic traditions. They formed the earliest avant-garde of the 20th century, which arose in France as a reaction to Impressionism. These artists turned to bright colours, deliberate chromatic contrasts, rough, passionate brushwork, simplified form, light and shade without half-tones and smooth transitions. On seeing the youthful Picasso’s Cubist pictures, Degas said, “Those young people want to do something more difficult than painting.” That memorable comment from the wise old artist expresses the difference between what art was at the time of his own youth and what it had become as a result of the revolution in visual art carried out by the Impressionists, who were mocked, unacknowledged, persecuted, but ultimately victorious.
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