European Avant-Garde: Impressionism to Cubism, Blanton Museum

The European Avant-Garde: From Impressionism to Cubism gathers fourteen paintings from the collection of Julian and Josie Robertson, now on long-term loan to the Blanton Museum of Art. The selection follows European painting across roughly seventy years, from a river scene painted outdoors in the 1870s to canvases made after the Second World War.

The earliest large-scale landmark is Monet’s ‘The Seine at Argenteuil’ (1877). Claude Monet is widely regarded as one of the most dedicated practitioners of Impressionism, a movement that takes its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise, shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. He insisted on painting nature as he perceived it, often outdoors, and the Argenteuil canvas shows that habit applied to a working stretch of river. Nearby hangs Signac’s ‘Port-en-Bessin – The Cliffs of Calvados’ (1883), a coastal view of Normandy cliffs from the same broad era of landscape experiment.

Paul Gauguin, a former stockbroker who turned to full-time painting after the financial crisis of 1882, is associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He is recognised for his experimental use of color and a Synthetist style distinct from Impressionism, and his place in the show marks the shift from recording a scene to interpreting it.

The twentieth century arrives with Pablo Picasso, who co-founded Cubism and worked in a wide variety of styles over a career of more than seventy years. His ‘Young Woman in a Light Blue Dress’ (1949) represents his later period. Wassily Kandinsky, born in Moscow and a pioneer of abstraction in Western art, is represented by ‘Bindung’ (1932), made during his years in Germany and just before his move to France. Hung together, the paintings show how a Russian-born abstractionist, a Spanish Cubist and the French landscapists of the preceding generations belong to one continuous argument about what a painting should show.