Da Picasso a Van Gogh
The catalogue of the exhibition

Curated by Marco Goldin

Hardcover, 23 x 29 x 2.7 cm
293 pages, 68 color plates, 53 color illustrations

"This exhibition, made of the sublime beauty of painting, perhaps was not planned and came into being in an unexpected way. In the way one always hopes for when one loves so deeply the story that painters tell with their colors. Those colors that name the world, both outside and within us. For this reason, it is impossible to remain indifferent. I believe. For this reason, I have never been able to write in any other way than this, mixing painting with life. Perhaps wrongly, or perhaps not."

These are some of Marco Goldin’s words at the opening of this book, which is not simply a catalog accompanying the major exhibition featuring dozens of masterpieces from the Toledo Museum of Art in the United States. Rather, it is a book that places painting at its core—and it could not be otherwise—while continuously weaving colors with the threads of literature, especially poetry, and then philosophy, science, meteorology, and cinema. It is a narrative that never ceases to amaze with its breadth, built upon a passionate voice that continuously links truth, life, and painting.

The journey pairs, in a suggestive backward voyage through European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries, Piet Mondrian with the great American abstract artists, from Morris Louis to Helen Frankenthaler, and then some of the leading figures of the avant-garde, from Picasso to Matisse, from Modigliani to Braque, from Klee to Delaunay. It also presents landscapes with figures by another American, the Impressionist William Merritt Chase, in dialogue with Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro, and continues with other great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters, from Cézanne to Monet, from Gauguin to Renoir, from Caillebotte to Fantin-Latour, even touching, for example, on the sublime art of Hopper.

The exhibition and the book open with a masterpiece by Richard Diebenkorn from the Ocean Park series and conclude with the famous painting Wheatfield with Reaper, Auvers by Vincent van Gogh, to which the final section of the exhibition is entirely devoted, including a film made specifically for the occasion. Two works separated by eighty years and differing in style, yet united by the emotional tension of yellow and blue—colors that signify both closeness and distance, permanence and fading. These are the terms within which Marco Goldin’s narrative moves in this book.