Exhibit of the week: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond

De Young Museum, San Francisco

Through Jan. 18, 2011

“It’s tempting” to think of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh as “passionate rebels who rejected the constraints of the 19th-century art world in order to blaze their own singular, revolutionary paths,” said Jennifer Modenessi
in the Contra Costa, Calif., Times. The truth, of course, is that a previous generation of artists—the impressionists—had already shattered conventional thinking about painting before Cézanne, van Gogh, and other so-called post-impressionists began exploring ways to continue the revolution. The De Young Museum’s new exhibition of art from Paris’ Musée d’Orsay retraces the wildly divergent paths staked out by this generation. Pointillist Georges Seurat chose to extend the impressionists’ experiments with rendering color and light. Paul Gauguin looked to non-European art for inspiration. Van Gogh and other proto-expressionists adapted their brush work “to convey mood and emotion.”

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This is the second exhibition of works from the d’Orsay to visit the De Young this year, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. It arrives on the heels of a crowd-pleasing impressionist show, but “demands more of viewers: more gauging of styles, artists, and geography, more openness to the unfamiliar.” Still, the rewards are many, and often unexpected. Most museumgoers, for instance, won’t know much about “neo-impressionist” Paul Signac. They should be pleasantly surprised by his The Riverbank (1886), “with its perfect rhyming of pointillist technique and light-shot, wind-ruffled water.” Symbolist paintings by Gauguin and Gustave Moreau also loom larger here than you might anticipate. Despite the title of the show, van Gogh looks “almost like a minor figure in it” because the historical context restores to his work its “full eccentricity.”

Paul Cézanne also forged his own path, said the San Francisco Examiner. But his seemingly modest landscapes and still lifes would prove to be unusually influential. In such works as Still Life With Onions (1896–98), he firmly “rejected the spontaneous, ephemeral quality of impressionism.” Where the impressionists had developed methods of capturing light, Cézanne sought new ways to render planes, shapes, and surfaces. “He aimed to reveal the essential forms beneath the surface, to bring a sense of structure and solidity back to painting.” By turning away from objects’ exterior appearances in a search for their “inner truth,” Cézanne set the model for the cubist and abstract painters who followed.