The success of the National Gallery of Australia’s 2009-10 exhibition Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gaugin, Cezanne & beyond is a testament to the enduring popularity of Post-Impressionist painting in contemporary cultural imagination.
It is surprising then that in conversation with Christine Dixon, Senior Curator of International Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia and Masterpieces curator, she admits that the scale of the public response to the Modernist exhibition was somewhat unexpected. “Many of the most popular shows of the last two decades have been Impressionism or antiquities”, sheexplains, “so it was a bit of a gamble for us to get the Post-Impressionists word out”.
As the record-breaking attendance figures attest – by my count an already staggering 476 000 that Christine revises upward to 482 000 – it was a gamble that paid off. Masterpieces captured the public imagination in a manner that echoes the spiritual fascination that Australian crowds showed for Holman Hunt’s Light of the World in 1906 or Longstaff’s Menin Gate at Midnight in 1928.
Part of the popularity of Masterpieces stemmed from the rare opportunity to viewthese iconic images. As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd suggested, it was a chance for visitors to “move beyond the images they have grown up with… and explore for themselves the artists’ choice of brushstrokes, the quality of colour, and the meaningful choices of character and form”.
However, Masterpieces was more than a convenient cultural tour. According to Christine, one of the main concerns in organising Masterpieces was bringing the works to Australia in a meaningful way that would add value to the experience. In curating the collection, though respect was given to the original hang, there was a desire to inspire new thematic ways of considering the D’Orsay collection. “I planned the display and showed the Orsay curators”, Christine explains, “and I kept the groupings that they had created… but what we wanted to do were things that were thematic and chronological at the same time”.
In their original environment in the Musée D’Orsay, the curators faced the challenge of hanging the works in a space lit by both natural and artificial light, a combination Christine describes as “impossible”. Repositioning the paintings under the expensive white lights of the NGA allowed them to be seen by fresh eyes in a new light, a sensation that highlights the fact that bringing the D’Orsay permanent collection to Australia as an exhibition was more than an act of mere transportation – it was an opportunity for transformation and reconsideration.
The placement of the works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne in the sameroom highlights this intent to inspire new ways of seeing. The interplay betweenCézanne’s cerebral constructions that experiment with form and perspective, andvan Gogh’s painterly and emotional canvases, revealed the breadth of the socialand artistic conventions being challenged by Post-Impressionist artists.
Unsurprisingly, Christine notes, the Cézannes were favoured by artists, while the paintings of van Gogh proved the most popular with the general public. I ask Christine why she believed van Gogh was able to capture the public imagination. She attributes the phenomenon to our knowledge of the artist’s “lust for life” and his sensibility. “Van Gogh is a very emotive artist, very direct, so that people can see the effect of the artworks”, she remarks, “any viewer can have a direct experience in front of a van Gogh. He possessed the gift of communication”.
After acknowledging the universality of van Gogh’s emotive visual language, Iwonder whether other aspects of his story contribute to his persistent popularity:the self-inflicted gunshot wound from which he died, the famous missing ear, drinking, smoking, psychosis. Van Gogh does, after all, embody our notions of the troubled artistic genius. Christine agrees, though her phrasing is, naturally, more eloquent. “I think there’s an immediate tragic story”, she offers, drawing back from the more gruesome details of his life, “a lack of success in his lifetime, but great success after he’s dead… a traumatic fight with mental illness”.
Further conversation reveals a plethora of fascinating details about the logistics of the exhibition that read like the plot of a Le Carré novel: negotiations took place in secret in multiple languages; some of the works were so large that they had to first go by road to Belgium before flying to Sydney in bespoke crates tailored to the purpose; the collection was too valuable to travel as one consignment so multiple loads were sent (here one glibly imagines decoy Magrittes in identical bowler hats).
Not that any of this would be apparent to the visitor, however. One of Christine’s main aims was to keep this immense effort behind the curtain. “I don’t want people to consider these things”, she remarks, “It’s like a miracle when they bloom on the wall”. Revisiting Claude Monet’s 1886 painting Study of a figure outdoors: woman with a sunshade turned to the right in the collection catalogue as I do, it is easy to see how these masterpieces transcend their time and place (or in this case the banality of its title). Here Monet’s palette moves beyond mere prosaic description – the subtle purple hues of the blooming wildflowers are reflected in the fabric of the woman’s dress, her arms and her face, and reappear in the shades of the clouds above. Viewing the painting, I’m unaware of the thousands of hours’ preparation and negotiation that brought it to Australia. Like the rest of the collection, it is a painting that is allowed to speak for itself.