When Modern Art Was Born

Beginning March 25, the National Gallery travels back to a time of questioning, risk-taking, innovation. It explores how the years from 1880 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 affected artistic posterity. With After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, it beams audiences back to the moment when giants like Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin laid the foundation for a modern art that broke free of convention. A younger generation split Impressionism into styles such as Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstraction.

The National Gallery's exhibition brings together more than a hundred works by such luminaries as Klimt and Kokoschka, Matisse and Picasso, Mondrian and Kandinsky - and complements them with a selection of sculptures by artists such as Rodin and Claudel. Visitors will also get to see some of the most famous works of art that shaped the decades around 1900. The works on loan come from all over the world: institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the Tate are donating the treasures for After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art from their collections until the exhibition closes on August 13.