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 consisted of Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin, Marquet, and Derain. A critic labeled them in 1905 as les fauves (wild beasts) when their work was shown in the annual Salon d’Automne, and so Fauvism was born.

There are many ways to display these Post-Impressionists. In the case of the AGO exhibition, the curators chose to emphasize the mythical subject nature of many of the works, the urge of these painters to return to classical themes, although they chose to paint them in broad strokes with vibrant colors very unlike the artists of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The theme, of course, is aided by the works having come from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which by default of the Bolshevik Revolution became owner of the art collected by two wealthy Moscow textile merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Both men were drawn to the works of Gauguin, Matisse and Cézanne among many others.

Shchukin also had a large collection of paintings by Picasso (51 in all). He was to come to view Matisse’s work as repositories of joy and repose, while in Picasso he saw visions of hell, eternal melancholy and inescapable tragedy, tempered by catharsis, which purified the soul through compassion. This must have been important to Shchukin because the tragic events in his life had seen him lose his wife through illness in 1907, followed by the suicides of his brother and two of his sons.

These tragedies made him will his collection to the city of Moscow on his death, but the Revolution of 1917 made the will obsolete. His collection, however, influenced the way Russians came to see art long before these shadowy political events. He opened his palace to the public and turned his home into a museum of contemporary French painting 10 years before the state nationalized his collection. He thus opened the world of contemporary Western European art to the Russian public and to its artists.

The two collectors died far from their homes in Moscow, driven abroad by the Bolsheviks. Morozov fled to Germany, where he died in 1921, just 50 years old. Shchukin, after first having to endure the indignity of being made to live in a servant’s room next to the kitchen in his own home, eventually fled to France, where he died in 1936 at the ripe age of 82. Although he had collected Matisse’s work for many years, he refused to meet him once he lived in France because he could no longer afford to buy the artist’s work. Both men seemed to have found a paradise in the paintings by artists who had taken on the task of immortalizing a lost—or a non-existent, wishful—world, which was lost in the end to war and revolution.

One must mention here that the proletarian Bolsheviks seemed to have known a thing or two about the value of this very bourgeois art, and so squirreled it away in the Hermitage Museum although it had no relationship to what would later become the accepted form of painting in the Soviet Union, namely the stilted, heroic socialist realism.

The Hermitage, like so many Russian institutions, is now broke, and this show is one way in which it is raising funds. The AGO and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collaborated for the first time in 35 years to get this exhibition off the ground, helped by the Hermitage Foundation of Canada.

There are 75 works in this exhibition, which is, indeed a journey into a world of exotic colors and images that arouse much delight in the on-looker. There are a few discordant notes in this painterly paradise. One wonders why some of Picasso’s stark, cubist forms were included in the exhibition, although one whole-wholeheartedly approves of his Naked Youth of 1906, which fits well into the theme set out by the three co-curators, Michael Parke-Taylor (the AGO’s associate of European art), Nathalie Bondil (chief curator of the MMFA), and Albert Kostenevich (curator of modern European art at the Hermitage).

Without having read the rather expensive, hefty, 225-page illustrated catalogue for this show, one can only draw one’s own conclusions as to why these cubist Picassos have been included. It would appear on the surface that the three curators stretched the rubber band a little and decided that being cubist in style, they represent classical forms, just as Maurice Denis’ toga-clad figures. More about Denis later.

The exhibit leads one directly to the vibrant art of Paul Gauguin. There are five of his works, including the wonderful Nave ave Moe [Sacred Spring/Sweet Dreams]  he painted in 1894 . In this work Gauguin has imposed Christian iconography onto the landscape of the South Pacific. He painted Eve holding an apple while sitting next to the Virgin Mary (identified by a halo), and in the background we see South Pacific idols looking broodingly behind rocks into a clump of trees while four figures appear to be dancing in ritualistic ecstasy.

It almost seems that having had one’s senses filled with this artist’s sensuous, yet amazingly chaste art, anything else would seem of little consequence. But, do not fear. There are nine works by Henri Matisse in this collection, all of them as appealing as the Gauguins, although stylistically dissimilar, and of a quite different exoticism.

Pierre Bonnard’s Mediterranean, a massive triptych commissioned by Morozov for the grand staircase of his Moscow residence, holds one’s attention with its fine depiction of the sun-lit Mediterranean in three different seasons. The presence of the triptych is considered a coup for the exhibit. The three panels are seen by art specialists as one of the greatest achievements of monumental decorative painting.

Voyage into Myth also contains the story of Psyche, another commission by Morozov. This one was for his music room and he chose Denis to paint the 13 wall panels. The AGO features all of them in a room setting, just as they would have been in the Moscow mansion. They offer an overwhelming view with their excessive, saccharine pinks and other equally artificial pastels. In this room one cannot help but feel that here the Eastern European love for excessive ornamentation has come to the fore. How different these panels are from Denis’ Wedding Procession, a work of tranquility and yet of a world of realism as a wedding party moves solemnly through a forest. One loves the shadows dancing on the ground and then snake up the dress of the bride. The painting is both static and full of motion, which has a powerful effect on the viewer.

There are a number of Paul Cézanne works, of which his oft-painted at left is represented by an especially fine example. There are several harbor views by such artists as Paul Signac, André Derain and Albert Marquet, the latter reminding one very much of a view of the Island nation of Malta. One can keep on listing painting after painting, but one last item must be mentioned, Henri Rousseau’s Combat of a Tiger and a Bull. It is perhaps the epitome of artistic nature painting. Although a fantasy of imaginary vegetation, this quite small painting achieves considerable impact as one senses the strength of the two animals in battle in this lush vegetation.