After Impressionism exhibition review, National Gallery, London

Paul Cézanne’s Bathers (1894-1905): ‘monumental’

(Image credit: National Gallery)

published 31 March 2023

The story of the great changes that occurred in painting in late 19th and early 20th century France is “probably the most frequently told” in all art history, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. The period produced “some of the most genuinely popular art ever created”, giving us Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and, ultimately, Picasso. As such, the National Gallery’s latest blockbuster covers well-worn territory.

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The exhibition focuses on the radical achievements of the artists who followed in the wake of the impressionists, covering the years from 1886, when the last impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, to the outbreak of the First World War. Bringing together 95 works, the show seeks to demonstrate how bold new tendencies originating in Paris radiated out to cities including Berlin, Brussels, Vienna and Barcelona, mixing efforts by the era’s most famous names with pieces by lesser-known artists. It features “incontestable masterpieces” aplenty, from Rodin’s “towering” 1898 sculpture of Balzac to Cézanne’s “monumental” Bathers (1894-1905). But can it possibly tell us anything new about this most familiar chapter of art history?

There are a few revisionist twists to the standard telling of modernism’s birth, said Hettie Judah in The i Paper. Gauguin’s paintings of teenage Tahitian girls, for instance, are accompanied by the “now-mandatory labels” noting his “exploitative” relationships. The inclusion of a handful of works by women artists, including Camille Claudel, Käthe Kollwitz and Sonia Delaunay, acknowledges their omission from the male-dominated story of the period’s art. Elsewhere, we see a number of pieces by “inventive and unconventional” artists seldom cited in this context, notably the Belgian painter James Ensor. His Astonishment of the Mask Wouse (1889) is a “bizarre scene” in which “a shrewish woman with bonnet and parasol” is surrounded by collapsed puppets. For the most part, however, it’s the same old story. “For all its lusciousness, this feels like a tremendously old-fashioned exhibition.”

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It’s an undeniably “flawed show”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Where it does succeed, though, is in reminding us quite how uninhibited and odd the leading lights of the era could be. We see a “wild” wooden relief of Matisse’s famous The Dance; Degas’s vision of “a woman lost in red ecstasy” as her hair is combed; and, most radical of all, Cézanne’s “dismantling” of nature with paintings such as his “hypnotic” view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. From here, it is just a short hop to Picasso’s “revolutionary” 1910 portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, in which the collector’s features disintegrate into “a crystal cavern” of shapes. For all its drawbacks, this is an engaging exhibition that takes you down many “odd byways”. It was “one I found hard to leave”.