Cathy's Art Diary

Glorious exhibition at the National Gallery of the Neo-Impressionist collection of Helene Kröller-Müller. This show included many beautiful paintings. The Neo-Impressionists are the artists we might think of as pointillists which is s a style, I am fond of so I was so excited to see so many of the works together. The subjects were much broader than I expected. I tend to think of the pictures as landscapes, but I loved a room of portraits. I expected to see Signac and Seurat but new finds included the Belgium artist Theo van Rysselberghe and my favourite work in the show was this picture by him of five women in a garden. I love the way you can't see their faces. A lovely touch was to include two paintings inspired by works by Millet as there is also a small exhibition of his work in the gallery at the moment. These included a Van Gogh who wasn't a Neo-Impressionists but experimented with some of the techniques and he visited Seurat's studio. This is a show that work...

Useful lecture at the National Gallery introducing their exhibition of Neo-Impressionist works from the collection of Helene Kröller-Müller. The co-curators of the show, Christopher Riopelle, curator of post 1800 works at the gallery, and Julien Domercq, formerly of the gallery and now at the Royal Academy, talked us through the story of the collection and the context of the works in it. They explained how Helene Kröller-Müller started collecting in the early 20th century aided by the painter and architect, Henry van de Velde and how the design for the exhibition references the museums he built for her. She was also a collector of Van Gogh's and owned 90 of his paintings but started collecting the works of the Neo-Impressionists, which we might think of as Pointillists, and how she thought of the collections as the yin and yang of art, one full of passion and one calm and serene. They talked us though a simplified explanation of the colour wheel and how these artists placed ...