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The pace at which art developed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century was astonishing. After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art at the National Gallery in London provides a crash course in the new paths painters and sculptors across Europe were taking over the three decades from the final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886 to the start of World War I.

It’s an absolutely absorbing, hugely enjoyable show. Much of what was new and shocking then is now very familiar, but this exhibition also manages to surprise at times; we certainly saw quite a bit of work we hadn’t seen before. 

If there was a father of modern art, it was perhaps Paul Cezanne. His Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) confronts you as you enter the show, its monumental figures flanked by an equally monumental plaster cast by Auguste Rodin for his Monument to Balzac, the great French novelist. But to appreciate just how different Cezanne was from what went before, look at this portrait of his wife, Hortense: 

It’s a very small painting, yet so eye-catching. The colours are even stronger and brighter than reproduced here; they almost shout out at you. That straw yellow of the sky is startling. Vincent wrote to his brother Theo that the intense light of the Mediterranean coast made him realise that his use of colour could be “even more exaggerated”. The thickness of the paint adds to what would have been the shock of the new in 1888. That impasto technique seems to define the roof tiles on the left and also gives depth and texture to the cream path that draws us through the work. Best of all is its use in the greenery…. the plants appear so lifelike, especially those spiky leaves that look like yuccas. 

Alongside Cezanne and van Gogh as pivotal figures in modern art in the early part of this exhibition is Paul Gauguin, but Gauguin’s adolescent nude lover in Nevermore leaves you these days less impressed by the exoticism and more concerned by the exploitation. 

An exploration of Pointillism takes in paintings by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, and Paul Sérusier’s totemic The Talisman, the picture that sparked the Nabi movement, has made it to London from Paris. 

Ah, Paris, the centre of the art world. And while there are so many well-known French artists to be found in this show — Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard — it’s a rather less famous one that catches the attention. You can feel the bustle of urban life in Avenue de Clichy (Street — Five O’Clock in the Evening), by Louis Anquetin. It is dusk: l’heure bleue as it’s known in French.

The limited palette captures that magical blue of twilight, and in the glow of the artificial lights the wet surface of the pavement is almost tangible. The crowd may be dressed in the fashions of 1887, but close your eyes a little and this dramatically cropped snapshot could be capturing the Paris of today, with the traffic sploshing along the boulevards.

Which brings us to another wonderfully different image, and it’s truly cutting-edge for 1900: a lady driver heading home after an evening out. She exudes confidence and dominates the canvas, towering above us and cutting the green sky backdrop in two. She seems to dazzle us with her golden headlamps which are picked up in the gold of the street scene behind her. This is The Automobile by Ramon Casas. 

This astonishing painting belongs to the collection of the Circulo del Liceo, a private club in Barcelona, which will be why we’ve never seen it before. Barcelona is one of the stops of a tour of European turn-of-the-century art hotspots in this show, and there’s another quite remarkable image from one of the city’s modernist artists nearby: The White Peacock by Hermen Anglada Camarasa, featuring a woman who seems to be enjoying her night out a lot less than Casas’s car-driver. 

From Barcelona to Brussels, where the highlight for us was Théo Van Rysselberghe’s Pointillist Portrait of Alice Sèthe, the daughter of a Dutch textile merchant, a symphony in light blue. 

There’s not a single British artist in this exhibition; London was very much cut off from the Continental mainstream at this time. We get to explore the Berlin and Vienna Secession movements, but the Berliners are not particularly exciting (Lovis Corinth’s Perseus and Andromeda is hardly breaking new ground), and the Viennese section is very sparse; a long wall has just two full-length Gustav Klimt portraits on it, one of which, the National’s own Portrait of Hermine Gallia, we’ve actually seen in two other exhibitions in the past 18 months. There are no Klimt landscapes, and even more surprisingly, there’s nothing by the most daring Austrian artist of the years before World War I, Egon Schiele. Did the curators try to bring in more Viennese paintings but not succeed? 

Otherwise, though, this really is a very comprehensive exhibition, even if there’s no spot to highlight, say, the Italian Futurists. You’ll need to allow between two and 2 1/2 hours to fully take it all in. 

Because in the final room, there’s a lot more happening. There’s Fauvism, there’s Cubism, and before you know it, there’s inevitably going to be Abstraction. There’s a riot of shape and colour with Braque, Picasso, Derain and Matisse.

André Derain and Henri Matisse spent the summer of 1905 together in the small fishing village of Collioure on the Mediterranean, and this is Derain’s portrait of Matisse’s wife Amélie in a patterned kimono. If van Gogh’s use of colour could be exaggerated in the late 1880s, this is what they were doing 20 years later.

Ah yes, Abstraction. The last word goes to Piet Mondriaan, three of whose paintings are hung together most effectively to demonstrate how he moved from the figurative to the abstract in just a few short years before World War I. 

On the left, an essentially naturalistic depiction of a tree from 1906-07. By 1908, he had moved to a much flatter schematic silhouette. And then, on the right, by 1912-13, Mondriaan has dissolved the tree into a series of lines and curves. 

It’s a great show, even if, you may not be surprised to read below, tickets are perhaps a little on the expensive side.

Practicalities

After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art is on at the National Gallery in London until August 13. It’s open daily from 1000 to 1800, with lates on Fridays to 2100. Standard admission starts at £24 Monday to Friday, but it’s £26 before 1200 and the same price at weekends; that’s before any Gift Aid donation, which can take the ticket price up to £29. Tickets can be reserved online here. The National Gallery is on the north side of Trafalgar Square, just a couple of minutes from Charing Cross or Leicester Square stations on the rail and Underground networks. 

Images

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress, 1888-90, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, June 1888, Private collection
Louis Anquetin (1861-1932), Avenue de Clichy (Street — Five O’Clock in the Evening), 1887, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut 

Ramon Casas (1866-1932), The Automobile, about 1900, Circulo del Liceo, Barcelona
Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), Portrait of Alice Sèthe, 1888, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Benoît Touchard
André Derain (1880-1954), Madame Matisse in a Kimono, 1905, Private collection, courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures 

Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944), Isolated Tree on the Gein I, 1906-07, Mondriaanhuis, Amersfoort
Piet Mondriaan, Tree, 1908, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague
Piet Mondriaan, Composition No XVI (Compositie I, Arbres). 1912-13, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel