Degas to Dali: month left to see best show in town

Degas to Dalí
Auckland Art Gallery
Until June 10

While many people travel these days and view artworks in the great museums of the world, it is always satisfying to see selected works from other galleries in touring shows.

The latest exhibition, Degas to Dali, at the Auckland Art Gallery is from the National Galleries of Scotland and includes some really significant works.

While there may be only 80, they have been chosen with care and virtually all provide new insights into the artists and the history of art.

This is a boutique collection filled with gems which either instantly delight or reveal new depths on close inspection.

The exhibition includes works which represent the major art movements from mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

It tells the story of modern art from the revolutionary works of the French impressionist and post-impressionist periods, as well as the major art movements of the 20th - cubism, surrealism, German expressionism, the British post-war period and American contemporary art.

The way the exhibition is presented enables the story of art to unfold, showing the way artists have developed, they have been influenced by other artists and social change, and the search for new ways of interpreting their environment.

One of the first works in the show, Courbet’s The Wave, seems a good traditional seascape of a wave breaking.

However, it is the mundane aspect of the work which was important at the time.

It was a rejection of dramatic historical and mythological subjects which had little to do with everyday life that motivated the artist to paint the ordinary.

It also shows the influence of Oriental art.

As readers of The Hare with the Almond Eyes will know, imports of Japanese art from the mid-19th century had a major impact on art.

Courbet has used the Hokusai wave to create the single simple image of many Japanese prints.

As an added reference, the exhibition also includes some prints by the later Japanese artist Hiroshige.

The small Manet lithograph with its sense of immediacy in capturing soldiers executing Parisians during the Paris Commune uprising is an example of artists capturing history as it happens.

However, it is interesting that this quick sketch of a street corner tragedy is actually based on one of his earlier paintings, The Execution of Maximilian, painted a few years beforehand and which was in turn based on Goya's The Third of May, 1808.

There is a delightful Seurat study for his major work, The Bathers.

This small oil sketch showing a man resting and a boy washing a horse shows the artist's awareness of impressionism, using strong colour and quick brushwork but not the pointillism of his later paintings.

There are several Degas works in the show, including some of his ballet dancers.

They manage to encapsulate his fascination with the world of dancers, capturing the informal aspects of the dancer’s lives.

He also demonstrates an innovative use of colour as though he has used a spray can to give added drama.

The Picasso work is from his blue period and shows his interest in figure painting.

There are none of his cubist works but there are a strong paintings by Leger and Braque.

Braque’s The Candlestick, in which he slices up the objects and spaces, questions the relationship between words, pictures and the objects they represent.

The work can be seen as an influence on Colin McCahon, with the use of words, restricted light and distortion, as well as the symbolic use of the candlestick.

The mid-century works include some great examples of sculpture - Giacometti’s Woman with her Throat Cut and Eduardo Paolozzi's Table Sculpture (Growth).

Alexander Calder’s delicate work, The Spider, seems related the Miro painting in the exhibition and to scientific models of the planetary system.

Other major works include Spencer’s Christ Delivered to the People, L S Lowry’s Canal and Factories, and Lucien Freud’s Two Men.

The couple of Dali works show his slightly erotic surrealism, along with his play between architecture and the figure.

Unfortunately, the two works are not hanging together, making close comparisons difficult.

The exhibition also a strong showing of Scottish colourists, including Samuel Peploe.

His Still Life shows the strong influence of cubist art through the use of structured brushstrokes and the faceted background.

With this more refined cubism, the perspective is not flattened and there are no multiple views, as in the Braque.

Simon Groom of Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art says: "Such is the calibre of works in this exhibition that all are almost constantly on display at the various national galleries in Scotland, or on loan to other institutions - from van Gogh’s well-known Olive Trees, which he famously painted when he was in the asylum, through to the iconic Raphaelesque Head Exploding by Dalí."

Says Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines: "Through Degas to Dalí we wanted to restate our commitment to presenting high-quality international exhibitions.  

"From the impressionists onward, there was a relentless questioning of tradition in art that shaped the course of modernism.

"Some of the movement’s most influential figures are represented by major works, among them Degas’ great portrait of Florentine art critic Diego Martelli and Rene Magritte’s enigmatic The Black Flag."

Events associated with the exhibition:

# Sunday, May 13, 3pm: Laurence Simmons – Dalí and Hitchcock: Paranoia on Screen.

Laurence Simmons from the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at he University of Auckland explores the potent mix of film and psychoanalysis in Dalí’s work and, in particular, his innovative contribution to Hitchcock’s film.

# Tuesday, May 15, 10.30am: Mary Kisler on Degas to Dalí

Mary Kisler traces the visual history of the modernist period from its beginnings in mid-19th century impressionism to the grittier realism of Britain in the latter part of the 20th century.

# Sunday, May 20, 1pm: Geoffrey Batchen – From Pictorialism to Modern Photography

Professor Geoffrey Batchen of Victoria University, Wellington, discusses how the relationship of photography to art movements changed radically from the 1880s to the late 1940s.