A Century of Modern Art: Monet to Matisse – Treasures from the Toledo Museum of Art II

In December 1873 a group of painters formed the Société anonyme to exhibit outside the official Salon, and in April 1874 they held their first exhibition, with thirty artists, in the studio of the photographer Nadar. The critic Louis Leroy mocked Monet's Impression, Sunrise in the satirical paper Le Charivari, and the name Impressionism came from his review. Through changes in membership, the group showed together eight times up to 1886. These painters often worked outdoors, en plein air, setting short, broken strokes of mixed and pure colour side by side, and premixed paint in tin tubes made it easier to paint on the spot. Impressionism is seen as a forerunner of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism; Van Gogh, a Post-Impressionist, used vivid colour and conspicuous brushstrokes to convey feeling. The Fubon Art Museum's second exhibition from the Toledo Museum of Art runs from Impressionism into modern art, with Van Gogh's Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers (1890) and Matisse's Dancer Resting (1940).

Stand close to see how the strokes sit side by side, then step back to see the whole; compare which colours are used in the light parts and in the shadows.

Up close it is stroke after stroke of colour; a few steps back, what does it become?