Paths to Abstraction 1867-1917

Up until the late 19th century, western art, generally speaking, focussed on holding a mirror up to nature. The more a painting looked like the real world, the more esteemed the artist. Then, by the early 20th century, the door was suddenly open to the idea of art that made an active point of not resembling the real world. Art had become abstract.

This is the earth-shaking, epochal shift explored in the AGNSW's Paths to Abstraction 1867-1917 - a mammoth presentation of more than 150 paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures and more. Sourced from 59 institutions from around the world, the works are by some of the biggest names in world art: Picasso, Monet, Cézanne, Derain, Gauguin, Mondrian, Munch and Kandinsky to name a few.

"It's been five years in the making and it just about killed me," laughs Terence Maloon, senior curator of special exhibitions at the gallery and the show's mastermind.

Maloon has structured this epic show into seven rooms. The first deals with James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), who might be considered the godfather of abstraction both for his murky night landscapes (nocturnes) and for his theories. "Whistler was claiming that the aesthetic interest of works of art was more serious than [art interested in] storytelling, moralising or fooling the eye. His whole stance marks him out as the first."

Whistler's nocturnes were his most controversial and influential works, Maloon says. "A night painting makes the space of the painting difficult to look into. There's the sense of the work being subjectless. And we find, to our surprise, that Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian all produced nocturnes among their early works."

The second room is dedicated to arguably the two greatest impressionists, Monet and Cézanne. "Just about all of the first generation of abstract artists acknowledged the liberating influence of Monet and Cézanne," Maloon says. Monet's explorations into the optical effects of pure colour and Cézanne's eschewing of illusionistic perspective are crucial developments in landscape painting that help set the scene for an art that is first and foremost about itself.

The Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin was also hugely influential. Gauguin's woodcuts of the 1890s were deliberately crude and violated the rules of printmaking at the time. Their influence eventually bled into painting. "There's an inherent abstractness to the woodcut itself which doesn't lend itself to illusionism, representation, or realism," says Maloon. "So in a sense it became like a carrier of the seeds of abstraction." One room of the show is dedicated to woodcut prints by Gauguin, Munch, Derain, Matisse and others.

The arrival of cubism, with its radical notion of multiple viewpoints in a single picture, is reflected in the exhibition by some of the movement's earliest examples. "These are flashpoint works," Maloon says. "The AGNSW actually owns a work by Braque [‘Landscape with Houses'] that by the consensus of art historians represents the real beginning of cubism. And we have a large Picasso work from Cologne, ‘Woman with Mandolin', which is an extraordinary masterpiece."

And does Maloon have a favourite work in the exhibition? "One work I find just awesome is by Vuillard and called ‘The Three Cups' [1900]. It's beautifully composed. It works on so many levels. To me it's a kind of miracle and on a knife edge of ambivalence between representation and abstraction."
Nick Dent

Other Events at the Art Gallery of NSW

• Shimmer - National Gallery of Australia
• We Call Them Pirates Out Here: MCA Collection Selected by David Elliott - Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)