Art: A Vision from Another Age

At the turn of the 19th century, Paris threw a really big party, the Exposition Universelle, to celebrate French achievements and world culture. It included pavilions in national styles--and an entire Swiss village. One of the star attractions was its Exposition Decennale, which showcased works of art created in the previous decade from 29 countries. That memorable assemblage is partly recreated in "1900: Art at the Crossroads," at London's Royal Academy of Arts until April 3. The show also displays pieces created between 1897 and 1903, including work by recognized modern masters of the day such as Cezanne and Gauguin, and young guns like Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as artists who contributed to the Decennale. Two rooms are devoted to the Paris show; the others are grouped under the headings Bathers and Nudes, Woman-Man, Portraits, Social Scenes, Interiors and Still Lifes, The City, Landscapes, Rural Scenes, Religion, Triptychs and Self Portraits. On May 11 the exhibition moves to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, where it will run until Sept. 4.

The show seeks to challenge the conventional view of the history of Western art--that it progressed from the Impressionists through various isms to abstraction, and that there weren't any significant developments around 1900. "[When you] try and reconstruct the history of this one moment, it's not clean and tidy," says MaryAnne Stevens, the Royal Academy's collections secretary and senior curator who co-curated the exhibition. "Here we have cut a slice through [the usual timeline]."

What makes it worth seeing is the number of quality paintings and sculptures by famous artists and those who are less well-known. Bad art has a fascination of its own. The German Franz von Stuck's Sin of 1899, which depicts a young woman wearing nothing but a large snake and an inviting smile, is enjoyably awful. But Belgian Leon Frederic's The Stream (1890-99) shows man's reach exceeding his grasp. Intended to portray the river of life, the vast canvas swarms with naked children. On the other hand, it is a joy to savor up close paintings by acknowledged greats. The Austrian Gustav Klimt's Pallas Athene of 1898 may be well-known through reproductions, but it has an even more mysterious presence in person.

It is also an opportunity to enjoy works for themselves instead of for their place in history. Visitors can draw their own conclusions from the show's juxtapositions such as Degas's After the Bath of c. 1898, hung next to Frenchman Carolus-Duran's Dana of 1900. It seems cruel to set this frigid marble-like figure against Degas's vital, hotly orange nude. But, says Stevens, "there are areas of closer affinity than we have been led to believe" between the two artists.

Though some lost works should perhaps stay lost, some richly deserve to be brought into the light. The show's finds include work by unfamiliar names, many of them women, Scandinavians, Russians and Americans. "What is emerging is how Francocentric art history is," says Stevens. "[In] museums in Russia these pictures are still hanging on the walls. No one has bothered to think about [these painters] within a European context, but they were European in 1900." Everybody knows about the Russian Constructivists, she says, because they form part of the modernist narrative, but painters like Degas's Russian friend Valentin Serov--whose portrait of a one-eyed old woman she cherishes--also deserve to be celebrated.

Stevens sees no conspiracy behind the fact that the women artists in the exhibition are not exactly renowned. "[These women's] reputations have survived back in their home countries," she says, pointing out that many of them come from areas--such as Finland in the case of the wonderful Elin Danielson-Gambogi--whose art is little known to the rest of Europe. However, "[British painter] Gwen John remained in the shadow of her more flamboyant brother, and never established a reputation during her lifetime. [French sculptor] Camille Claudel was never permitted to move away from the shadow cast by Rodin, her teacher and lover."

Americans Robert Henri and Childe Hassam both have pictures in the City room that can stand up to better-known practitioners like Pissarro and Picasso. In Hassam's Late Afternoon, New York: Winter of 1900, filigree trees and an elegant lady disappear into a pastel fog. Henri's Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, NYC) of 1902 is less refined: the sky lowers over damp pedestrians.

The Landscape room contains stunners by Monet (the blanched Morning on the Seine, 1897) and the Swiss Auguste Baud-Bovy (the pale lake of Serenity, c. 1890). But most soul-catching is Fir Forest in February painted in 1897 by the Dutch Albijn Van den Abeele--who only turned from writing to painting at age 39. Painted in bosky shades of green, the canvas is filled by ranks of fir trees. Stevens discovered Van den Abeele while researching landscape art of the period, and was determined to include the Fir Forest. "Finding that picture was a nightmare," she says. But her regard for the artist drove her on to seek out its owners, who were bemused when they saw their picture in such illustrious company. "They were amazed Abeele had made it into this galaxy of Cezanne, Monet and Klimt." The big names have hogged the stage for long enough--it's time for that era's many unknowns to take a bow.