The installation explores a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation. The installation celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. It follows the influences they had on their peers, on younger generations of French artists and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.
With over a hundred works by painters ranging from Klimt and Kokoschka, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian and Kandinsky, complemented by a selection of sculpture by artists including Rodin and Camille Claudel, the presentation follows the creation of a new modern art, free of convention, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction.
It also includes some of the most iconic works of art created during these decades. Important loans come to the exhibition from institutions and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d'Orsay and Musée Rodin, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; Tate Modern, London; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut.