Dates: Sat., September 17, 2022 – Sun., January 15, 2023
Venue: Exhibition room 2

Modern Western Painting
French Painting from Impressionism to the Early 20th Century

The Pola Museum of Art’s Western painting collection contains many important works by major artists, and traces the history of Western art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in France.

The paintings of 19th century Impressionists such as Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet captured the effects of light with vivid colors and rapid brushstrokes. The Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat worked with bright colors and a pointillist technique, drawing on optical and chromatic theory. Later, Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck moved forward with brilliant palettes and pointillistic brushwork, using even bolder strokes and colors in the style that came to be known as Fauvism in the early 20th century. This was followed by wide-ranging explorations, not only of color but also of shape, including the works of Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger, whose works show the influence of Cubism. Also on view here are paintings by Georges Braque, who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed Cubism and explored the construction of tactile forms and pictorial spaces while working primarily in the genre of still life.

Postwar Painting

Abstract Expressionism and Informel

For approximately a decade following World War II, abstract painting flourished on a global scale. The orientation toward painterly abstraction was known as Abstract Expressionism in the US and as Informel in Europe, especially in France. Artists who left war-torn Europe for the US during World War II included many Surrealists, abstract painters, and other artists, architects, and designers such as those affiliated with the Bauhaus, many of whom found refuge in New York City where they relaunched their creative endeavors. Abstract Expressionist painting in particular was characterized by the use of huge canvases and “all-over” compositions, in which the entire picture plane was filled with abstract forms, and the approach known as “Action Painting”, which emphasizes the artist’s physical actions using techniques such as “dripping” and “pouring” of paint to produce spots and linear swirls of paint on canvas, attracted widespread attention.

Meanwhile, the French critic Michel Tapié coined the term Informel (meaning “amorphous”) in 1950, and artists at the center of this movement abandoned conventional aesthetics to create un art autre (“art of another kind”). In doing so they broke away from constructed, geometric images that had prevailed in abstraction thus far, and sought to render visible the products of states of mind that could not be grasped through reason. The lyrical and non-geometric nature of their works led them to be known as Informel. Tapié introduced the activities of the Gutai(Gutai Art Association), an art group that emerged concurrently in Japan, to the rest of the world as a Japanese equivalent of Informel. In doing so he demonstrated the global spread of abstract painting, which had originated in France.