The exhibition is structured into successive chapters, or moments, moving backward through the history of art. It begins with American abstraction of the late twentieth century, from Richard Diebenkorn to Helen Frankenthaler to Morris Louis, from Ad Reinhardt to Lyonel Feininger. It then transitions to several crucial developments in European abstraction, from Ben Nicholson and Josef Albers to Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, each grounded differently in the structures of reality transformed into apparitions.

When painting crosses the threshold from the twentieth to the nineteenth century, from that point onward, or rather backward, the exhibition enters its three major themes: still life, figures and portraits, landscapes. In the first case, we find among others two of the greatest artists who dedicated themselves to still life in the twentieth century: Giorgio Morandi and Georges Braque. Meanwhile, Henri Fantin-Latour and Camille Pissarro, during the formative years of the Impressionist group, reveal, especially the former, the refinement that this theme led the finest painters to pursue.

The section devoted to portraits, figures, and figures within settings is very extensive. It forms an extraordinary gallery of masterpieces, starting with Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, embodying a taste poised between chromatic hedonism and symbolism. Also significant is the passage to Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, with faces painted in very different ways by De Chirico and Modigliani, and later a splendid 1909 Cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso.

Within the context of figures in settings, the American Impressionists’ love for their French counterparts is fully revealed, perfectly captured in the relationship between William Merritt Chase and Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro. Going even further back, the great painting by Courbet and Millet’s The Quarriers. Three masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas give this section absolute and spectacular value.

The part dedicated to landscape, which concludes the exhibition, also bears the mark of exceptionality. It begins with the visions that some painters, each in their own distinct way, dedicated to Venice (Signac) or to Paris (Delaunay and Léger), sometimes with canvases of considerable size.

But just as in the portrait section, with Renoir, Manet, and Degas, Impressionism is represented at its highest level, so too is it here, with a stunning sequence of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes. Dominating the scene, also in terms of immense visual impact, is one of the finest versions of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, painted in the final phase of his life. Then a new relationship, this time tied to the image of a seaside coast, between Merritt Chase and another French Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte, with his landscape in Trouville.

What follows is a succession of masterpieces, starting with one of the most significant paintings by Paul Gauguin from his first and enchanting period in Tahiti, between 1891 and 1893. Then the very artist whom Gauguin, like so many others, had taken as a model and reference: Paul Cézanne, who depicts in the distance one of the many villages beloved by this group of painters. Village names that also reappear in the visions of Renoir, in this case in Normandy, or of Alfred Sisley (The Aqueduct at Marly), painted in the very year of the first Impressionist exhibition, 1874.

Everything comes to a close in the final space of the exhibition, on a last wall set apart from the rest, with Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers, in which Vincent van Gogh, at the end of July 1890, bids farewell to life. A work that anticipates by far the outcomes of a Modernity that was emerging, and that he had already reached, in a time when he was almost completely misunderstood. And yet always with faith in the future, even though he had deliberately chosen not to embrace that future. A painting that, in its absoluteness, in its being drenched with color and humanity, splendidly represents the very high quality of the works held by the Toledo Museum of Art, now in Treviso for a few months.