Room 1

Our journey backward begins with one of the greatest interpreters of American abstraction after the mid-twentieth century, Richard Diebenkorn. Born in 1922 and died in 1993, Diebenkorn is the American painter who brings to completion the voyage through the vast American space that had already begun shortly after the start of the nineteenth century with the realist painters of the Hudson River School, in direct contact with the immense landscape stretching from the East toward California.
That vast American space, before Diebenkorn’s eyes, takes shape in large fields of color, whether he paints a horizon that includes a view of the Pacific in California or distills that same view into the composite grid of his Ocean Park series. For him, as for all other painters in this space, abstraction is not an absence of seeing but rather the transformation of sight into movements of the soul, into a true inner vision.
This is what these artists had drawn from Monet’s image of the water lilies – hence, a large-format version of that subject closes this room. It represents the possibility the painter granted himself: to bring the very texture of painting to the surface, allowing it to become a visible depth.

Room 2

The large painting by Morris Louis in this room marks the conclusion of the first section of the exhibition. Thematically and chronologically, it should have been placed upstairs, but for reasons of space it is displayed here, as the final chapter of that American season between the 1950s and 1960s. Morris Louis is one of the most fascinating representatives of second-generation Abstract Expressionism, belonging to the movement known as Color Field Painting.
Of great interest is the balance between the deconstruction of Cubist and post-Cubist space and the outcomes of the early twentieth-century color avant-gardes, in certain artists who were pivotal during the second decade of the century, from Delaunay to Léger to Klee.
The rest of the room explores in greater depth the theme of American abstract painting which, during the 1930s and 1940s, moved beyond Cubist fragmentation to reach points of contact with Mondrian – as in the case of Bolotowsky – or affinities with Russian Constructivism, as seen in Crawford, Glass Greene, or Rice Pereira. Among them, certainly the most intriguing is Charles Sheeler, one of the leading exponents of the so-called Precisionism.
Finally, Max Beckmann stands among the most important German painters of the first half of the twentieth century, skillful in combining the lessons of great masters of the past such as Rubens and later Delacroix, with a formal clarity that in his case stemmed from an interest, for example, in Picasso.

Room 3

Let us return for a moment to the notion of heroic space – the one that had belonged to the pioneers of American painting in the nineteenth century and that was later taken up by the abstract artists. For all of them, being there, physically traversing that space, is the fundamental point of their artistic quest.
Thus, Lyonel Feininger paints with a landscape in mind that is a kind of suspension – a floating within territories that belong both to the soul and to vision itself – within an essentiality that is also found in the elegant, sinuous surfaces of Ben Nicholson. Nicholson was connected to several sculptor friends, from Brancusi to Henry Moore, a fact that is not irrelevant to his exploration of the line.
The pair of paintings by Tanguy clearly takes us into another dimension – that of explicit Surrealism. Beginning in the 1930s, he replaced organic, plant-like forms with mineral structures resembling dolmens and menhirs, seemingly adrift in spaces that, on one hand, evoke the allure of infinite plains stretching toward the horizon, and on the other, mark contact with the realm of dreams. His Surrealist foundation would continue to manifest itself until the end of his life.

Room 4

This room focuses on the relationship between figures and the space of nature – a relationship that reached absolute heights at certain moments in history, from Giotto to the great Venetian season between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It was precisely that season which laid the foundation for the achievements of the painters who came before French Realism and, above all, the Impressionists. This can be seen here, for example, in the works of Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot.
It is interesting to note how, in those same years, across the Atlantic, the deeply American impulse – linked above all to the Hudson River School and its depictions of the vast wilderness – had already run its course. Thus, William Merritt Chase, one of the leading figures of so-called American Impressionism, turned back to the example of the great French masters, as did others of his generation.
Finally, Bonnard – like Matisse, with whom he shared friendship and artistic affinities – constantly evokes the softness of color which, especially in his distinctive images of southern France, between Provence and the Mediterranean, become true arabesques. Even when, as in this case, he begins from the reconstruction of mythical episodes.

Room 5

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the term “still life” began to enter the specific artistic vocabulary in Italy and France – thus quite late compared, for example, to the extensive Dutch production of the previous century. It was as if there had been a certain hesitation in naming a pictorial genre that was indeed highly popular, yet far from central within the academic hierarchy of values.
This categorization of painting, which continued well into the nineteenth century, overlooked among other things the great commercial success of the genre, which had begun in seventeenth-century Holland. Even though still life had become an autonomous and recognized genre, that was not enough to free it from the constraints of academic conventions.
In this room, some of the greatest still life painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are brought into dialogue – from the almost abstract temptation in Giorgio Morandi to the still distinctly late-Cubist lesson of Braque. There is also an interesting transition to still lifes from the time of Impressionism, with works by Pissarro – seen in his fruitful relationship with Cezanne – and then by Fantin-Latour, along with his wife, Victoria Dubourg. Both were linked to the legacy of Chardin, the great eighteenth-century painter of such subjects.

Room 6

In this room, different visions of nature are brought into dialogue – those still reminiscent of Impressionism in George Hitchcock, an American painter who later became a naturalized Dutch citizen, and that of Robert Henri, whose pursuit was of a modern form of expression, even though this was not always achieved, as can be seen in his 1911 painting, where he cultivates a type of landscape clearly still rooted in naturalism.
Both Warner and Van Gorder, American painters, received their artistic education in Paris, as was the case for many artists of the time. The Impressionist taste therefore prevails – in Van Gorder’s Parisian views as well as in Warner’s New York cityscapes.
Impressionism is also clearly at the foundation of Paul Signac’s artistic explorations. Along with Georges Seurat, he was a leading figure in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, held in the spring of 1886. The movement beyond Impressionism lay in the importance of colors placed side by side rather than mixed and blended – a language that Gauguin and Van Gogh would later make bolder, paving the way for the various color avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Incidentally, these emerged officially in the very same year, 1905, when Signac painted this Venetian view.

Room 7

This room, along with the smaller adjoining one, contains several splendid portraits and figure paintings that trace a line of descent from Matisse and Hopper back to Manet and Degas. It is a journey into the discovery of the soul, which reveals itself silently through the gaze – beginning with the dancer whom Matisse captures in a moment of rest.
But it is the silence and solitude of Hopper’s theater figures that dominate the scene, in his extraordinary portrayal of modern man, within an atmosphere of suspension that both enchants and fascinates. Before arriving, with Picasso, Modigliani, and De Chirico, at the Parisian season stretching from the end of the first decade through the second and third decades of the twentieth century – when extraordinary portraitists like them embody a sense of melancholy that at times seems without resolution. All this unfolds alongside the formal innovations introduced by Pablo Picasso.
The masterpieces of Manet, Degas, and Renoir strongly underscore the importance of portraiture among the Impressionists. From the sense of the unexpected and the spontaneous, they derive the pleasure – before even the intention – of depicting modern man in the modern world. Without nostalgia or reminiscence. More and more, with the Impressionists, the true center becomes the gaze, the gaze that opens onto the depths of consciousness.

Room 8

The final room of the exhibition brings together some of the highest achievements of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape painting, featuring several of the most celebrated masterpieces from the Toledo Museum of Art. It begins with the work of James Whistler – an artist who can hardly be described as Impressionist – since his focus lies not on the recognizability of places but rather on the atmospheric and visionary quality of the scene.
From Sisley’s 1874 painting to Renoir’s landscape painted at the end of that same decade in Normandy, and then to Caillebotte’s canvas, also inspired by the Norman coast and dating to the mid-1880s, the sequence offers a perfect synthesis of the transition from plein-air painting to its reconsideration in the wake of Monet.
The artistic relationship – marked by admiration and respect – between Gauguin and Cézanne is clearly visible in their two works displayed side by side on the wall. It represents the overcoming of canonical Impressionism and thus the shift from impression to sensation, from pure physical vision to vision filtered through interpretation. A process that often involves color not merely as a product of sight but, as in the Van Gogh masterpiece at the end of the room, as an expression of a world that always borders on the power of inner life.