The Exhibition
Marco Goldin

If I look at the beginning and the end of the exhibition’s itinerary, there are two paintings—already marvelous in themselves—that seal, in a double image, this reaching of beauty from one point to another. The exhibition will begin with one of the stunning versions of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park, number 32 from 1970, in its absolute and at the same time atmospheric composition of yellow and blue. As if that yellow were a sand in front of the infinite blue of the Pacific Ocean. The compactness of sky and earth, pulsating in unison.

And almost a century earlier, on the other side of the great sea, ten thousand kilometers away, a painter had ended his life by plunging into a different yellow—the immense fields of wheat at Auvers-sur-Oise, in northern France. Beneath the blue of a sky in which the white sound of tangled clouds spread. Vincent van Gogh, a few days before his death at the end of July 1890, painted the poignant work now in Toledo, which will be seen in Treviso.

One of his very last testimonies of life, with the reaper cutting the wheat, astonished within that vast expanse, and the first sheaves serving as anchors for anyone lost in that sea: “As far as I am concerned, I am completely immersed in the vast nature with the wheat fields against the hills, as wide as a sea, all beneath a sky of delicate blue and white tones.” In the same letter, just two weeks before the final shot, he declared himself “taken by a feeling that makes me paint everything.”

Looking at and brushing against these two paintings, loving them so deeply, I thought that the journey should be exactly like this. From the later to the earlier, in a reversal of time that could give us even greater understanding, even greater emotion. Diebenkorn’s yellow, at the end of the 20th century. Van Gogh’s yellow, at the end of the 19th century. The blue of an ocean imagined by that painter on the edge of California. The blue of a sky stretching toward the horizon over a French countryside, as the painter surrenders to time. I thought that an exhibition that begins and ends this way carries within it a mark of destiny, and for this reason it is worth telling.

***

There is one thing that has always fascinated me in 19th- and 20th-century American painting, understood through its powerful association of feelings, and that is the profound sense of continuity. That which you can feel knocking at the door of your heart when you look at a landscape of the Hudson Valley by Thomas Cole or an Atlantic view on the Maine coast by Edwin Church, in the full 19th century. And then you find it again, of course in other forms, first in Homer and then in Hopper, and later in Rothko and Diebenkorn. It is that vertigo of the American space that makes nature, according to Claude Reichler’s beautiful definition, a “total anthropological fact.”

That vast space, in the great abstract painters, becomes solely a matter of the spirit, a matter of interiority. In rendering the vision abstract, the specific reality of the painted object is forgotten. What remains is a broad stroke of light, a scent, a smell over the sea, a sound. In the fullest synesthetic action. After all, in one of his Fragments, Heraclitus said: “The hidden pattern is stronger than the manifest one.”

It seems to me that it is precisely Richard Diebenkorn, in his continuous back-and-forth between figurative and abstract, who best seals this journey, by rendering the memory of seeing into astonishing painting. For from every direction comes the surprise of seeing, from everywhere the silence and the sound of nature, the song of birds, the voices of animals. To become—within this painting, which gradually seems to do without the real—both force and time. There is no before or after, only the presence of being in the world. In this, Edward Hopper placed his fundamental contribution, especially when—as the famous painting in the exhibition demonstrates with the greatest possible grandeur—he fills a place seemingly of nothingness with silent meanings, such as this empty theater, which is in fact inhabited by mystery.

Hopper works to give life to that inextricable knot that makes the journey into interiority his highest point. These are bare rooms of the psyche, illuminated by the sun of the mind or the twilight of the approaching evening, in the confined space of a room or a theater. Hopper thus unites reality with vision in his image. His 1953 declaration remains perfect to define his field of action: “Great art is the outward expression of the artist’s inner life, and this inner life will be translated into his personal vision of the world. The inner life of a human being is a boundless and varied realm.”

***

The exhibition will therefore unfold in successive chapters, or moments, moving backward through the history of art, starting from American abstraction of the late twentieth century. It will then move on to some pivotal experiences of European abstraction, from Ben Nicholson and Josef Albers to Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, in their different ways of relying on the structures of reality transformed into visions and apparitions.

When painting crosses the passage from the twentieth century to the nineteenth, moving forward—or rather backward—we enter the three major themes: still life, figures and portraits, and landscapes. In the first case, two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century devoted to still life, Giorgio Morandi and Georges Braque, will appear, while Henri Fantin-Latour and Camille Pissarro, at the height of the formation of the Impressionist group, will show—especially the former—the refinement to which this theme led the finest among painters.

The section dedicated to portraits, figures, and figures in context will be very extensive. An extraordinary gallery of masterpieces begins with Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, combining a taste for chromatic hedonism with symbolism. Of particular significance is the transition to Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, with faces painted in diverse ways by De Chirico and Modigliani, followed by a splendid cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso from 1909.

Within the realm of figures in context, the American Impressionists’ admiration for their French counterparts will be fully revealed. This can be perfectly observed in the relationship between William Merritt Chase’s The Open Air Breakfast and the works of Berthe Morisot (In the Garden at Maurecourt) and Camille Pissarro (Peasant Resting). Going even further back, there is Courbet’s large painting The Trellis, followed by Millet’s work. Three absolute masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and especially by Édouard Manet (Antonin Proust) and Edgar Degas (Victoria Dubourg), give this section spectacular and unequivocal significance.

The section dedicated to landscape, which will conclude the exhibition, is equally exceptional. It begins with the visions that certain painters, each in a very different way, devoted to Venice (Signac) or 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, the same occurs with a stunning sequence of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes. Dominating the scene, also in terms of the enormous visual impact it will have within the space of the Santa Caterina museum, will be one of the most beautiful versions of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, painted during the final phase of his life. Then follows a new relationship, this time connecting the image of a seaside coast between William Merritt Chase and another French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, with his landscape at Trouville.

But then comes a series of masterpieces, beginning with one of the most significant paintings by Paul Gauguin from his first, enchanting period in Tahiti, between 1891 and 1893. Then there is the artist whom Gauguin himself, like many others, had chosen as a model and reference: Paul Cézanne, with his Avenue at Chantilly, depicting in the background one of the many villages beloved by this group of painters. Names of villages also reappear in the visions of Renoir (Road at Wargemont), in this case in Normandy, or Alfred Sisley (The Aqueduct at Marly), painted in the same year as the first Impressionist exhibition, 1874.

To conclude everything, in the final space of the exhibition, there is one last isolated wall, featuring Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers in which Vincent van Gogh, at the end of July 1890, bids farewell to life. A work that, long before its time, anticipates the outcomes of an emerging modernity already achieved by him, though then almost entirely misunderstood.

Yet it is imbued with a faith in the future, even as he had deliberately chosen not to embrace that future. A painting that, in its absolute intensity, overflowing with color and humanity, splendidly represents the highest quality of the works preserved in the Toledo Museum of Art. Soon to be seen in Treviso.