After Impressionism – Inventing Modern Art, at the National Gallery, reviewed

Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the National Gallery, but is it too much for a single blockbuster? Symbolism, cloisonnisme, pointillism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction: if impressionism was a watershed in modern art, the streams that flowed from it were many and various.

By setting a time frame of 1886 to 1914 – from the last impressionist exhibition to the first world war – After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art narrows its options only to widen them by expanding its focus beyond Paris to Brussels, Barcelona, Vienna and Berlin. In the closing decades of the 19th century, groups of young avant-garde artists in these happening European capitals (dozy old London is off the map) ganged together in exhibiting societies to challenge the academic status quo. Enterprising and outward-looking, they were not just membership societies; they invited foreign artists to exhibit.