Brightest Young Things

all photos: Kimberly Cadena

After Burtynsky's outstanding OIL show, Corcoran is turning their focus briefly towards masterpieces of later 19th, early 20th century painting with the compact but perfectly curated "From Turner to Cezanne" show that opens this Saturday. The show features 50 or so works drawn exclusively from the extraordinary collection of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, granddaughters of the wealthy industrialist David Davies and is separated into 3 rooms, each not quite a primary color, leading you through a chronological narrative of the Davies Collection: redish with realism, yellowosj with impressionist paintings (which includes Renoir's much chrusehed upon La Pariesienne) and blueish with the post-impressionists.

The show offers a welcome breather from the late 20th and 21st centrury shows that seem to have dominated the DC art of late, giving us a glimpse back into a (seemingly gentler) time where classical painting techniques were still being pushed further every year and there was a (deceptively?) simple beauty in art to be enjoyed.

With only 53 paintings to represent 3 of the most prolific movements in European painting (each of which deserves shows if not whole galleries of their own), kudos go to the Corcoran curatorial team for  telling the story so well and so trimly. Artists represented  are  (among others) Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, Augustus John, Edouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, J.M.W. Turner, and Vincent van Gogh, and many of the works have not been shown outside of Europe, ever before.

The show runs January 30th to April 25th and you can find further details of it here: http://www.corcoran.org/turnertocezanne/

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