After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, The National Gallery review ★★★★★

As far as Western art is concerned, Impressionism is the movement that sparked everything that was to come after it and the art that would come under the loose umbrella of ‘modern art’. The National Gallery has assembled dozens of spectacular artworks to tell the story of what came after Impressionism in the art equivalent of a Marvel Avengers movie. There’s works by great artists such as Cézanne, Rodin, Gauguin, Picasso, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt and the list goes on and on… and on.

Focusing purely on the years between 1886 and 1914, there’s a lot of what we’d expect to find, including a collection of Vincent Van Gogh’s stunning landscapes – including a few we hadn’t seen before. Pointillists like Paul Signac show how using coloured dots can bring a sardine fleet at sunset to life, and of course we have some angular Cubist portraits by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.



The exhibition does spread its wings wider than the usual suspects to include female modernists, and the sculpture of two lovers by Käthe Kollwitz is an excellent work that feels like a modernist equivalent of Rodin’s The Kiss. And Spanish painter Isidre Nonell, a new find for us, has a deeply moving painting of two emaciated figures huddled together.

A broader lens on post-Impressionist artists does lead us down some dead ends as Maurice Denis’ pink-lit vision of motherhood is so kitsch that it crosses over to sinister – the type of work that would be the villain in a horror movie where the mother and child in the painting come to life with murderous intent. And a dip into German painters gives us Lovis Corinth’s nudes that feel so staged and unnatural, that it’ll make you wonder why they’re even in the same exhibition as Munch’s powerful vision of his sister’s funeral – the hollowed eyes and ashen skin of those in the latter remain haunting even after several viewings.



Thankfully, the great works vastly outnumber the also-rans and every visitor will be blown away by several pieces in this 'greatest hits' exhibition. By spreading its net too wide the curation struggles to offer a narrative beyond that Impressionism sparked a revolution in art. Thankfully there's a masterpiece round every corner that makes you forget about the curation, and lets us bathe in artistic brilliance.

Second image: Paul Gauguin - Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). © National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Third image: Georges Seurat - The Channel of Gravelines. © The National Gallery, London