Museums in Taipei have gone out of their way over the past year to collaborate with their European and American counterparts to mount exhibitions of modern art.
Manet to Picasso: Masterpieces From the Philadelphia Museum of Art, currently on view at TFAM, is a group show of paintings and sculpture from the modern period, beginning in the 1870s and moving up to the 1960s.
The exhibition brings together 53 paintings by masters such as Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as bronze sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz and Auguste Rodin, Picasso, Degas and Henri Matisse.
Arranged in four sub-themes — Daylight presents landscape painting, Beauties ponders the female form, Shapes exhibits work that reinterprets the still life, and Dreams displays paintings that explore the subconscious — the exhibit offers museumgoers a chronological glimpse of the period’s aesthetic preoccupations and reveals how early landscape painters set the tone for later modernist experiments.
An essay in the exhibit’s catalogue states that the philosophical ideas of positivism (the notion that knowledge can only be verified if derived from sensory experience) developed in the early 19th century and laid the foundations for and had a lasting influence on modern art.
No longer constrained by a visual and textual tradition handed down from the classical period, these artists felt free to rely on their own perceptions to depict the phenomenal world.
Landscape painters did so through two basic motifs: pastoral landscapes associated with leisure, and urban scenes that portray factories and manufacturing. The outlined houses filled in with thick swaths of solid color found in Paul Cezanne’s Quartier Four, Auvers-sur-Oise (Landscape, Auvers — 1873) and Claude Monet’s brilliant lighting effects in Morning at Antibes (1888) are examples of the former, while Camille Pissarro, employing the neo-impressionist pointillism of Georges Seurat to depict a port scene in The Effect of Fog (1888), is an example of the latter.
What: Manet to Picasso: Masterpieces From the Philadelphia Museum of Art
When: Until Sept. 26. Open daily from 9:30am to 5:30pm, closes at 8:30pm on Saturdays
Where: Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號). Tel: (02) 2595-7656
Admission: NT$250
On the Net: www.tfam.museum
Artists applied their new aesthetic to the growing participation of women in the period’s public sphere. Mary Stevenson Cassatt’s Woman With a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879) is emblematic of this tendency. The play of light and shadow cast by artificial light emphasizes the ravishing beauty of a woman at the theater.
Begun by the early impressionists, optical experiments in still life paintings can be found in Georges Braque’s Basket of Fish (1910), an early cubist work, and Chessboard, Glass and Dish (1917) by Juan Gris, which is composed of overlapping geometrical objects of different visual perspectives.
The curators of Manet to Picasso should not only be commended for mounting an accessible exhibit that gently expounds the thesis that landscape artists kicked off the visual experiments of modernism, but also for picking paintings and sculptures that give a valuable
insight into life in late 19th and early 20th-century Europe.
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