From Monet to Van Gogh to Kandinsky
New Visions on Nature and Modernity
Date
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To be defined
Program
Masterpieces from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and other important collections
Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Mondrian: names that mark the milestones of an epoch-defining shift. In less than eighty years, between the 19th and 20th centuries, European painting moved from the direct observation of nature to the dissolution of reality. The exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti traces these transformations.
Landscape – both natural and urban – and modern life lie at the core of the exhibition, offering the vantage point onto an era in which the relationship between the artist and the visible world is radically redefined, opening the way to new modes of perceiving and representing reality.
Organized into nine chapters, the exhibition traces the key stages in the evolution of painting between the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning with the rise of the naturalist sensibility of the Barbizon School, grounded in direct observation of the landscape. This approach deeply influenced the Italian Macchiaioli, who developed a language built on light and color.
With Impressionism, a modern style of painting emerges, able to capture the fleeting perception of the subject, while in the Netherlands the artists of The Hague School render these same principles in a more sober, atmospheric vision.
Starting in the 1880s, the Post-Impressionists challenged the idea of an art faithful to nature. Their explorations took different directions: color and form gained independence, space was reinterpreted, the image became more essential and charged with symbolic meaning, while color took on an increasingly emotional value.
In Italy, Divisionism reworked these explorations with a lyrical approach, celebrating the role of light and its vibration.
At the same time, the theme of urban life became increasingly central in conveying the era’s profound social and cultural transformations.
At the start of the 20th century, Futurism celebrated the movement and energy of the city. Various other movements followed, including Return to Order, which recovered balance and classicism.
Meanwhile in Europe, many artists pursued the path of abstraction, simplifying and progressively dissolving the real to build an increasingly autonomous language, freed from the representation of the visible world.
The exhibition captures an extraordinarily rich period of creative ferment, experimentation, and talent, through the works of the great protagonists of modern European painting.
Among them: Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. Alongside them, the Italian masters: Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini, Giovanni Pellizza da Volpedo, Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati, Giovanni Boldini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Mario Sironi.
The exhibition itinerary brings together 120 works – paintings, drawings, and prints – most of them from the Dutch museum’s collections, alongside a selection from major Italian public and private collections. The exhibition is organized by the Fondazione Ferrara Arte in collaboration with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art of Ferrara, and is curated by Sandra Kisters and Vasilij Gusella.
Contacts
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Corso Ercole I d'Este 21 - 44121 Ferrara
