There’s a painting by Paul Gauguin from 1897 called: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It sums up the defining mood of the generation represented in this exhibition at the National Gallery, between the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and war in 1914 when the world fell apart.
The answer is, no one knew. By 1886 people had got their heads round Impressionism: painting outdoors, capturing the fleeting moment and eschewing grand subjects for urban streets and landscapes. But what followed wasn’t a single, comprehensible thing called Post Impressionism, but an explosion of creativity in umpteen directions, more like the Delta of the Nile. This ambitious exhibition seeks to follow those currents beyond Paris to Vienna, Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin and Scandinavia. We move from the severe classicism of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Sacred Grove to the pure abstraction of Mondriaan, taking in all sorts on the way.
