Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia

Editor’s Note: If you can’t attend this exhibition, consider wandering through the Museum’s collections. We did just that, finding their Object of the Day a launching point for exploring the ever-appealing work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. We then clicked on the the label This Artist/Maker which led us to 20 additional examples of his work.  

At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance; 1890. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French, 1864 – 1901. Oil on canvas, The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, 1986 

The dream of Arcadia, a mythic place of beauty and repose where humankind lives in harmony with nature, has held an enduring appeal for artists since antiquity. With its promise of calm, simplicity, and order, it has served as both an inspiration — the sought for, but never fulfilled ideal of a paradise here on earth — and as an image of refuge, a place that is distant and seemingly protected from the vicissitudes of life. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of sweeping and often disruptive social, technological, and intellectual change, this dream found a powerful new currency and once again spurred the imagination of a new generation of painters — many of whom played key roles in the development of modern art.

At the heart of this new exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art are three monumental canvases, each an acknowledged masterpiece and each, in its own distinctive way, a powerful response to the Arcadian tradition: Paul Cézanne’s enigmatic The Large Bathers (1906; Philadelphia Museum of Art), the largest of this artist’s paintings in an idyllic landscape, which caused a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1907; Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which situates an Arcadian theme in the distant realm of Polynesia where this artist spent his last years and created some of his finest and most powerful works; and Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909-17; The Art Institute of Chicago), the mural-sized painting that was inspired in part by Cézanne (Matisse owned and revered a small painting by Cézanne on the theme of the bathers, citing it as one of the greatest influences in his artistic life) and represents one of the greatest achievements of Matisse’s career.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Paul Gauguin, 1894-1898, oil on canvas; 54.8 in × 147.5 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia  examines the different, yet closely related and complementary meanings of these three paintings, each a landmark in the history of modern art. Featuring more than 60 works by 27 artists drawn from public and private collections in this country and abroad, the exhibition  explores more broadly both the enduring appeal that the Arcadian ideal had for artists in the 19th century, such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Georges Seurat, and Cézanne, and how it emerged once again in a new and powerful form in the work of a generation of modern painters — including Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Robert Delaunay, and many others — who embraced the age-old theme of a serene and joyous life in harmony with nature and adapted to their own, often radical pictorial purposes.