After Impressionism – Inventing Modern Art, at the National Gallery, reviewed

Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the National Gallery, but is it too much for a single blockbuster? Symbolism, cloisonnisme, pointillism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction: if impressionism was a watershed in modern art, the streams that flowed from it were many and various.

By setting a time frame of 1886 to 1914 – from the last impressionist exhibition to the first world war – After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art narrows its options only to widen them by expanding its focus beyond Paris to Brussels, Barcelona, Vienna and Berlin. In the closing decades of the 19th century, groups of young avant-garde artists in these happening European capitals (dozy old London is off the map) ganged together in exhibiting societies to challenge the academic status quo. Enterprising and outward-looking, they were not just membership societies; they invited foreign artists to exhibit. Thus at a time when Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh were only just becoming famous in France, examples of their work were being introduced to audiences across Europe. It was at an exhibition of Les XX in Brussels that Van Gogh made his only sale in 1890.

The story starts in a gallery shared by the three great pioneers of post-impressionism, with Maurice Denis’s 1900 group portrait of their young disciples, the Nabis, gathered in admiration of a Cézanne still life. But none of the above seem to have had much influence on Brussels, where it was pointillism that went viral. After Les XX showed Seurat’s ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte’ in 1887, the Belgian avant-garde, led by Théo van Rysselberghe, broke out in dots. None of them worked Seurat’s magic with colour (the Italian divisionists made a better stab at it) and their embroideries on the theme are slavishly dull; it’s left to James Ensor’s daffy ‘Astonishment of the Mask Wouse’ (1889) and George Minne’s etiolated ‘Kneeling Youth of the Fountain’ (1898) to defend the Belgians’ claim to originality.