The National Gallery have announced details of a major new exhibition exploring the radical art of European cities from 1886 to 1914.

The National Gallery has today announced details of a new exhibition featuring over 100 paintings and sculptures by artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, Kandinsky and Mondrian is set to open at the gallery next year.

On display from the 25th March, After Impressionism will focus on the exciting and often revolutionary artistic developments across European cities during the period between 1886 to 1914. The purpose of this exhibition will be to explore two main themes in the development of the visual arts in Europe at this time: the break with conventional representation of the external world, and the forging of non-naturalist visual languages with an emphasis on the materiality of the art object expressed through line, colour, surface, texture and pattern.

After Impressionism will begin by focusing on the achievements of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Rodin to take visitors on a journey through the art created  in cities such as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Barcelona. The exhibition will conclude with some of the most significant modernist works, ranging from Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction.

Highlights of this wide-ranging international survey include André Derain’s La Danse (Private collection), Edgar Degas’s Dancers in the Foyer (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen); Paul Cézanne’s Grandes Baigneuses (National Gallery, London); Edvard Munch’s The Death Bed (KODE Bergen Art Museums, Bergen); Paul Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh); Camille Claudel’s Imploration / l’Implorante (Musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine); and Lovis Corinth’s Nana, Female Nude (Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis.). 

This newly announced exhibition will be curated by the art historian and curator MaryAnne Stevens and Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, with art historian and curator Julien Domercq. MaryAnne Stevens says: ‘In this exhibition we seek to explore and define the complexities of a period in art, and in wider cultural manifestations, that can assert the claim to have broken links with tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.’

After Impressionism will be on display at the National Gallery from the 25th March until the 13th August 2023.