| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Art Reviews |
October 2002 |
Voyage into Myth is at the AGO until Jan. 5, 2003. It will then travel to Montreal where it will be on view from Jan. 31 to April 27, 2003.
By Alidė Kohlhaas
The art world is forever applying labels to artists, finding ways to classify their work, the period in which they worked, the style they used to create their work. It is done as much to help art historians to place the artists into usable categories as it is to aid the general public that comes to view works in galleries and museums. For that purpose the paintings and sculptures in the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Voyage into Myth: French Painting from Gauguin to Matisse from the Hermitage Museum, Russia, has been labeled Post-Impressionist. One cannot quarrel with this label, but the show includes works that step out of the realm of what most people view as Post-Impressionism
While the Impressionists formed an artistic movement delineated by their efforts to depict the visual impression of the moment, especially when it came to the shifting effects of light and color, they chose various means to get to this point. There never was a Post-Impressionist movement. The term was coined by the London-born art critic/artist Roger Fry, who was curator of paintings for New York’s Metropolitan Museum from 1905-10. He organized the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910 for the Grafton Galleries in London.
The artists who followed the Impressionists were in just as much of a rebellious mood against the Impressionists as these had been against the formal, classical style prevalent in France when they came on the scene. This new group of unconnected artists, who followed the Impressionists, chose to paint what they saw as their individual conceptions of the objects they depicted on their canvases rather than what can be called the general observer’s view. While they, too, were concerned with effects of light, they preferred more formal compositions. The main body of these Post-Impressionists . . .
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