News - After Impressionism

Cézanne, Klimt, Mondrian, Picasso - a new exhibition at The National Gallery in London next year will bring together, for the first time, the radical art of European cities from 1886 to 1914...

Press Release

A ground-breaking new exhibition of over 100 paintings and sculptures by artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, Kandinsky and Mondrian, with loans from museums and private collections around the world, After Impressionism (25th March – 13th August 2023), will include some of the most important works of art created between 1886 and around 1914.

While celebrating Paris as the international artistic capital 'After Impressionism' will also be one of the first exhibitions to focus on the exciting and often revolutionary artistic developments across other European cities during this period.

Starting with the towering achievements of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Rodin, visitors will be able to journey through the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created in cities such as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Barcelona. The exhibition will close with some of the most significant modernist works, ranging from Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction.

'After Impressionism' will explore two main themes in the development of the visual arts in Europe at this time: ‐ the break with conventional representation of the external world,; and the forging of non-naturalist visual languages with an emphasis on the materiality of the art object expressed through line, colour, surface, texture and pattern.

Highlights of this wide-ranging international survey include André Derain’s 'La Danse' (Private collection), Edgar Degas’s 'Dancers in the Foyer' (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen); Paul Cézanne’s Grandes Baigneuses (National Gallery, London); Edvard Munch’s 'The Death Bed' (KODE Bergen Art Museums, Bergen); Paul Gauguin’s 'Vision of the Sermon' (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh); Camille Claudel’s 'Imploration / l’Implorante' (Musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine); and Lovis Corinth’s 'Nana, Female Nude' (Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis.).

Lenders to the exhibition include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; Musée Rodin, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museu nacional d’arte de Catalunya, Barcelona; Tate; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

'After Impressionism' is curated by the art historian and curator MaryAnne Stevens and Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, with art historian and curator Julien Domercq.

MaryAnne Stevens says: ‘In this exhibition we seek to explore and define the complexities of a period in art, and in wider cultural manifestations, that can assert the claim to have broken links with tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.’

 After Impressionism runs from 25th March – 13th August 2023 at the National Gallery, London. Find out more and book tickets here.

Images - Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), Paul Cézanne, about 1894 – 1905, © The National Gallery, London

The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe, Georges Seurat, 1890, © The National Gallery, London

Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), Paul Gauguin, 1888, © National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh