From Picasso to Van Gogh, masterpieces from the Toledo Museum on show in Treviso
More than 60 works from the collections of the Ohio museum are on display at the St. Catherine's Civic Museums until 10 May
The yellow of the crops blonding in the sun and the blue of the sky with its tangled clouds. It is with Wheat Fields with Mower - which Van Gogh painted in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890 just a few days before his death - that the exhibition "From Picasso to Van Gogh" closes at the Musei Civici di Santa Caterina in Treviso (open until 10 May 2026). An exhibition that right from its title reveals its challenge to the visitor by anticipating the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) to the Dutch Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). An unusual itinerary that traces the history of art from 1970 to the mid-1800s, connecting Impressionism and Abstraction, a continuous dialogue between American and European authors.
The yellow of the Santa Monica beach and the blue of the Pacific Ocean are the incipit. Atmospheres of the large-format canvas No. 32 of the Ocean Park series by the American Richard Diebenkorn from which the itinerary begins: 80 years after Van Gogh's farewell, which closes the 8 rooms, on the other side of the world.
The curator, Marco Goldin
"An exhibition of masterpieces, but not a mere package exhibition," explains curator Marco Goldin. An excursus in 60 works granted by the Toledo Museum of Art, founded in Ohio (USA) in 1901 by a glass magnate, and now here all together for the first time in Europe, to then take off for Australia and Taiwan. A proposal augmented in Treviso by loans such as Figures at the Theatre (1927) by Hopper, Flowers and Fruit (1866) by Latour and The Girl with Flowers (1862) by Coubert. A dense succession of references and sensations. The watery element linking Claude Monet and Helene Frankenthaler. Geometric abstraction from Mondrian to Bolotowsky. Signac, Léger, Klee. The Colour Field Painting of Morris Louis and the precisionism of Charles Sheeler. Tanguy, Nicholson and Feininger. William Merritt Chase in dialogue with Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro. And then the three rooms in the hypogeum - still lifes, figures and landscapes - between objects in the foreground and use of colour, new intimacy of gazes and Normandy coasts. Morandi, Braque, Cezanne, Signac, Matisse, the portraits of Manet and Degas, De Chirico, Modigliani and The Woman with the Black Hat (1909) by Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne and Gauguin, Sisley, Whistler, ending with Van Gogh.
From Picasso to Van Gogh, Musei Civici di Santa Caterina, Treviso, until 10 May 2026
