The exhibition, curated by Marco Goldin and promoted by the Municipality of Treviso with Linea d'Ombra and with the support of Gruppo Euromobil, brings to Europe for the first time over sixty works from the Toledo Museum in Ohio, a prestigious American institution founded in the late 19th century that has become one of the most important centres for 20th-century art.
An exciting journey back in time, a journey through art from 20th-century American abstraction to European Impressionism, in a constant dialogue between the two sides of the Atlantic to understand, through extraordinary masterpieces – landscapes, portraits, figures in settings and still lifes – why abstraction came about and where it started.
The exhibition takes visitors on an evocative journey through the history of European and American art in the 19th and 20th centuries, bringing together Piet Mondrian and the greats of American abstraction, from Morris Louis to Helen Frankenthaler, alongside some of the leading figures of the avant-garde, from Picasso to Matisse, Modigliani to Braque, Klee to Delaunay. Then there are the landscapes with figures by another American impressionist, William Merritt Chase, in dialogue with Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro, and other greats of impressionism and post-impressionism, from Cezanne to Monet, Gauguin to Renoir, Caillebotte to Fantin-Latour, touching on the sublime art of Hopper, for example.
The exhibition opens with a masterpiece by Richard Diebenkorn from the Ocean Park series and concludes with Vincent van Gogh's famous painting Wheatfield with Reaper, Auvers, to which the last space of the exhibition is entirely dedicated, including a film specially made for the occasion, which can be viewed in the video room next to the painting. Two works separated by eighty years and different in style, but united by the emotional tension of yellow and blue. These two canvases encapsulate the meaning of the exhibition itinerary created by Marco Goldin.
