Degas to Picasso - Colin Harrison

Although the traditional view of French art as a steady progression from the representational to the abstract, has long since been rejected, the meanings of modernism have never been examined in all their complexity. This book - and the exhibition it accompanies - will address this void. The pieces in the exhibition will be selected from the private collection of Stanley and Ursula Johnson. Although the Johnson Family Collection is well known, only one substantial exhibition from the holdings has ever been shown: Cubism and La Section d'Or in 1991. This is a rare opportunity to showcase a substantial selection of items, which will constitute an exhibition both enjoyable for the general public and thought-provoking for the specialist. During the French Revolution, artists began to give as much attention to scenes from contemporary battles as their predecessors had to those from the Bible and antiquity. This trend was accelerated by the two greatest French Romantic artists, Gericault and Delacroix, who found heroism and pathos not only in war, but also in peace. Among the Impressionists, Manet in particular was notorious for his increasingly sophisticated compositions drawn from everyday bourgeois life, blurring the boundaries between portraiture and genre painting. Pissarro, on the other hand, became especially well known for his experiments incorporating timeless peasant figures into the agricultural landscape of Normandy, while Czanne found classicism in modern representations of traditional themes such as bathers, and Van Gogh produced one of his most astonishing images in his portrait of Dr Gachet. Meanwhile, Edgar Degas, who had a strictly academic training, refined and distilled many of Manet's subjects, so that his late experiments in pastel, which were rarely exhibited in his lifetime, are still astonishing in their immediacy. The influence of Czanne on progressive artists in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be over-estimated. The earliest experiments in Cubism by Picasso and Braque owed their existence to Czanne's denial of mere representation, and his reduction of form to geometrical shapes.All of these great names and more are given their dues in this concise, yet informative, book.Exhibition from February to May 2017.