After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art will open at the National Gallery in March 2023

A major new exhibition of around a hundred paintings and sculptures by artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Kandinsky and Mondrian opens at the National Gallery in March 2023.

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

With loans from museums and private collections around the world After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art , includes some of the most important works of art created between 1886 and around 1914. While celebrating Paris as the international artistic capital, the exhibition also focuses on the exciting and often revolutionary artistic developments across other European cities during this period.

Starting with the towering achievements of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Rodin, visitors will be able to journey through the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created in cities such as Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna. The exhibition closes with some of the most significant modernist works, ranging from Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction. After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art explores the 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.

Image: Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), about 1894 – 1905, © National Gallery, London

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 Art Museums, Bergen); Paul Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh); Camille Claudel’s L’Implorante (Nogent-sur-Seine, Musée Camille Claudel); and Lovis Corinth’s Nana, Female Nude (Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis.). The exhibition consists of around a hundred works, mostly paintings but also including a careful selection of innovative sculpture.

After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art 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 guest associate curator, art historian Julien Domercq.

Location: Rooms 1-8
, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN. Date: 25 March – 13 August 2023. Price: from £24 Monday – Friday, from £26 Saturday and Sunday.