4 December - 3 May 2026
Discover an exciting journey through the birth of modern art at the exhibition at the Ara Pacis Museum. With 52 iconic works by Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and others, the exhibition examines the artistic revolutions that redefined European painting between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Lungotevere in Augusta (angolo via Tomacelli)
The exhibition represents one of the most extensive and articulate investigations into the birth of pictorial modernity ever presented in the capital. With 52 masterpieces on loan from the prestigious Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), the show reconstructs a trajectory that leads from the innovations of Impressionism to the radical experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes.
Curated by Ilaria Miarelli Mariani and Claudio Zambianchi, and promoted by Roma Capitale in collaboration with MondoMostre and Zètema Progetto Cultura, the exhibition offers a critical and historically grounded reading of the processes that reshaped European painting from the late nineteenth century to the emergence of modernity. Through works by Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Kandinsky and other masters, visitors trace the metamorphosis of pictorial language: from the study of light and the fleeting moment to the construction of form, from the inward expression of feeling to the bold experimentation that would ultimately lead to abstraction.
The scholarly project behind “Impressionism and Beyond” is grounded in a diachronic reading of the period spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth. Rather than offering a simple celebration of established styles, the exhibition highlights the dynamic dialogue between tradition and innovation—between the desire to depict reality and the need to reinvent the visual codes through which that reality is interpreted.
The arrival in Rome of masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts adds a further layer to this reflection: many of these works were acquired in the United States at a time when the European avant-gardes were not yet fully accepted in their countries of origin. Their temporary return to Europe offers a privileged opportunity to reconsider the history of modern art through the lens of transatlantic reception, collecting practices, and shifting aesthetic judgments.
The Detroit Institute of Arts ranks among the most authoritative and forward-looking museums in the United States. Its collections—built with remarkable foresight since the early twentieth century—attest to the central role played by American institutions in supporting and disseminating European modernity.
At a time when many European museums were reluctant to embrace the radical innovations of artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, or Picasso, institutions like the DIA recognized the significance of their contributions and integrated them into public collections. Bringing these works back to Europe allows visitors to reflect on the complex relationship between artistic production and the history of collecting, and on the ways modernity was filtered, interpreted, and redefined across the Atlantic.
The exhibition constructs a unified narrative in which each generation of artists responds to the discoveries of the preceding one. Rather than presenting Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and the early Avant-Garde as isolated or conflicting movements, the show emphasizes their continuities and overlaps. Visitors witness the gradual dissolution of academic naturalism, the quest for new formal structures, the intensification of subjective expression, and the emergence of an autonomous visual language that ultimately breaks with traditional representation.
The first major section of the exhibition examines the genesis of Impressionism, restoring its full historical and theoretical complexity. Far from emerging as an organized movement, Impressionism took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century through a set of shared frustrations with the academic system, perceived as incapable of representing a modern world in rapid transformation.
The artists who anticipated this new language—ranging from Courbet to the landscape painters of the Barbizon School, and even certain luministic experiments by Turner and Constable—paved the way for a conception of painting grounded in direct observation and in a freer relationship with visible reality.
Within this climate of profound revision, the Impressionist generation shifted its attention away from grand historical and mythological subjects toward the dimension of immediate experience. The city, cafés, theatres, public gardens, and the boulevards traversed by the new bourgeoisie became visual laboratories in which painting captured the vibrations of contemporary life.
Light, in its constant metamorphosis, is no longer merely a descriptive element: it becomes the structural principle of the painting, capable of dissolving contours, altering color relationships, and defining the time and space of perception. Color, applied in quick, autonomous strokes, no longer imitates reality but translates its sensations—it vibrates, blends in the viewer’s eye, and suggests an energy that transcends simple representation.
The result is an unprecedented conception of painting as a visual and perceptual experience, in which fidelity to reality is no longer tied to the precision of detail but to the sincerity of the impression. The world is captured in its flow: a flicker of light, a reflection on water, a fleeting expression, a crowd in motion. This attention to the momentary, the ephemeral, the elusive marks a definitive break from academic tradition and inaugurates a new poetics of vision, one destined to profoundly influence European painting in the decades that followed.
Gustave Courbet represents the indispensable premise for understanding the birth of Impressionism. Through his realist painting—constructed with dense strokes and a vigorous pictorial material—Courbet rejected academic idealization and placed tangible reality at the center of his work: labor, landscape, daily life. His direct, deliberately anti-rhetorical gesture asserted that art must express truth, not convention.
This vision, still rooted in the representation of the natural world, nonetheless introduced a decisive principle: the autonomy of the artist’s gaze. It is precisely this perceptual freedom that the Impressionists inherited, transforming it into a tool for analysing light, capturing the instant, and exploring a modernity in perpetual motion. Courbet thus becomes the first link in a chain that would lead, through successive emancipations, to the full affirmation of modern painting.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir embodies the most lyrical dimension of Impressionism, oriented toward a painting of human vitality and sensory perception. His portraits—such as the celebrated Woman in an Armchair featured in the exhibition—reveal the softness of skin tones, the vibration of fabrics, the delicacy of gesture, all enveloped in a light that softens contours and harmonizes the composition.
Renoir does not merely observe: he transfigures reality into an atmosphere of warmth and serenity, presenting a world in which beauty emerges from the simplicity of the moment. His brushwork is soft and flowing, able to fuse figure and environment into a single luminous unity. In this sense, Renoir represents the emotional and intimate component of Impressionism, the one that transforms everyday life into visual poetry. The exhibition highlights this dimension as one of the cornerstones of artistic evolution at the end of the nineteenth century.
Edgar Degas occupies a singular position within the Impressionist season: while sharing an interest in contemporary life, he preserves a compositional discipline that distinguishes him from the rest of the group. His dancers, laundresses, theatre scenes, bars, and views of Paris reveal an almost scientific attention to human gesture, captured in its automatisms, rhythms, and tensions.
Degas experiments with daring angles, close-up framings, and photographic cuts, anticipating a manner of seeing that fully belongs to the modern age. His drawing remains firm, yet the pictorial surface welcomes subtle luminous vibrations resulting from acute and relentless observation. In the exhibition, Degas represents the most analytical component of Impressionism: not the luminous ecstasy, but the control of the gaze, the mental reconstruction of the scene, the urban awareness of a rapidly changing era.
Impressionism marks an epochal shift not only in stylistic terms but above all in the way it redefines the relationship between artist, subject, and perception. The abandonment of academic composition and traditional chiaroscuro is not a mere technical change but a conceptual transformation: painting becomes the immediate interpretation of experience.
Light, observed in its continual changes, becomes the true protagonist of the work, determining form more than line itself. With this revolution, the Impressionists assert that visual truth lies not in the stability of contour but in the mobility of vision. This insight would open the way for all subsequent research—from the structural investigations of Cézanne to the chromatic explorations of Matisse, and ultimately to the dissolution of form in the avant-gardes—making Impressionism the original matrix of modern art.
Paul Cézanne represents the crucial turning point between Impressionism and modernity. While beginning from the observation of nature, he soon distanced himself from the immediacy of Impressionist light to search for the deeper laws that structure the visible. His painting is built upon a rigorous method: chromatic planes defining volume, tonal relationships creating space, brushstrokes oriented to construct an underlying visual architecture.
Cézanne does not seek to depict appearance, but stability beneath appearance. His still lifes and landscapes—even in smaller formats—testify to this constructive effort that transforms the canvas into a coherent organism governed by an internal logic. For this reason, he was recognized as the “father” of Cubism and as the artist who, more than any other, opened the path to twentieth-century painting. The exhibition restores his centrality with clarity and precision.
Post-Impressionism is not a unified movement; it is a territory of individual experimentation. Some artists pursue a Symbolist spirituality; others explore intensified chromatic expression; still others seek the geometric construction of space. What unites them is the desire to move beyond sensory impression and achieve a more stable, meditated, and conceptual form of representation.
Within this context emerges the progressive simplification of forms and the will to convey the essence rather than the surface of the world. The exhibition demonstrates how painting gradually approaches the language of abstraction, driven by the desire to express states of mind, memories, and invisible sensations.
The third section of the exhibition is dedicated to the radical transformation introduced by Vincent van Gogh, a key figure in the transition from Impressionist perception to full expressive subjectivity. While the Impressionists had liberated painting from academic constraints in order to capture the vitality of the moment, Van Gogh takes a further step: reality is no longer simply observed but interpreted through an intense, restless sensitivity. His vivid palette, energetic strokes, and dense chromatic matter translate the world into an emotional language, in which every line and every color becomes a vehicle of inner tension.
The works on display clearly reveal this paradigm shift: nature, faces, interiors are not described but experienced—transformed into images that convey states of mind rather than visual accuracy. This process of interiorization inaugurates a new conception of painting, one capable of expressing psychological energy and the human condition. From this revolution would arise the major currents of European Expressionism, revealing how Van Gogh opened the path to an understanding of art as revelation rather than imitation.
The works by Van Gogh featured in the exhibition reveal a language founded on pulsating lines, intense chromatic accents, and dynamic brushwork. Reality becomes a mirror of emotion. The goal is no longer to represent what the eye sees, but what the soul perceives. This shift revolutionizes the very notion of painting.
Van Gogh inaugurates a new idea: art as confession, as existential gesture. Painting does not describe; it reveals. It becomes a language of the unconscious, of inner urgency, of psychological intensity. From him derive Expressionism, the chromatic freedom of the Fauves, and the spiritual dimension of the early avant-gardes.
The exhibition underscores the breadth of Van Gogh’s influence: his energy resonates in Matisse, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and much of twentieth-century art. The impulse toward subjective, powerful expression becomes, thanks to him, one of the guiding principles of modernity.
The final section of the exhibition explores the conceptual leap of the historical avant-gardes. Art enters a new dimension: form loses its descriptive function and becomes an autonomous system. Reality is distorted, simplified, fragmented. This is the birth of the modernist language.
Within the exhibition, Henri Matisse emerges as one of the most innovative protagonists of early twentieth-century sensibility. His research—rooted in the study of the masters and in the Fauvist lesson—aims at a use of color that transcends natural description to become the structuring principle of composition. In Matisse, color does not depict; it creates an autonomous space, a rhythmic and harmonic dimension that determines the emotional tone of the image.
Surfaces become simplified, forms stretch and expand, contours acquire an almost calligraphic precision, while his often daring palette constructs visual relationships of remarkable intensity. The presence of his works in the exhibition testifies to his desire to transform painting into a space of serenity, fullness, and mental luminosity, far from drama or conflict. For Matisse, art is a tool of elevation, capable of offering the viewer an experience of peace and inner harmony.
His chromatic freedom, his decorative conception of space, and his pursuit of formal synthesis would profoundly influence later movements—from design to abstract painting—making him an essential pillar of modernity.
Pablo Picasso, central figure of twentieth-century art, appears in the exhibition as the artist who, more than any other, absorbed, reworked, and reinvented the discoveries of the past in order to project them into a radically new dimension. His oeuvre unfolds as a continuous process of transformation: from the introspective melancholy of the Blue Period to the grace of the Rose Period, from Cézanne’s structural lessons to the Cubist breakthrough, Picasso traverses diverse languages without ever settling into a fixed style.
His strength lies in his ability to deconstruct reality, analyse it, and reconstruct it according to autonomous logics freed from traditional perspective. Through this analytical and inventive disposition, Picasso introduces a plural and dynamic vision of the subject, opening the path to the historical avant-gardes.
The works presented in the exhibition illustrate this tireless propensity for renewal and reveal an artist who conceives painting as a field of inexhaustible possibilities. His influence is immense: he not only transforms figurative language but alters the very notion of the artwork as the product of multidimensional thought.
In the exhibition, Amedeo Modigliani and Wassily Kandinsky represent two distinct yet deeply complementary trajectories in the development of modern art. Modigliani carries forward a research centered on the human figure, which he reinterprets through elongated lines, stylized features, and an elegance nourished by both archaic sculpture and Italian tradition. His portraits do not seek physical likeness but the revelation of an inner presence: each figure appears suspended, introspective, permeated by a quiet melancholy that detaches it from historical time.
Kandinsky, by contrast, gradually abandons figurative representation to explore the autonomous potential of color, line, and form. In his works, the painting becomes a rhythmic, evocative organism capable of conveying moods and spiritual tensions without referring to the natural world. While Modigliani preserves the enigma of the human through poetic simplification, Kandinsky inaugurates the abstract path as an expression of “inner necessity.” Viewed together, the two artists reveal that modernity is not a single road but a convergence of sensibilities that, though divergent, collectively redefine the destiny of painting.
Within the section devoted to the avant-gardes, the presence of Max Beckmann introduces a reflection on the most dramatic dimension of modern painting. Far from Matisse’s formal optimism or Picasso’s constructive energy, Beckmann adopts a dense, incisive language marked by strong contours, distorted figures, and compressed atmospheres.
His compositions, often populated by enigmatic characters, reveal an inner world shaped by psychological tension and existential unease. In this sense, Beckmann embodies the most tragic form of Expressionism: painting becomes a space of confrontation with the anxieties of the age, with the vulnerability of the individual, and with the moral complexity of the twentieth century. His inclusion highlights how modernity develops not only through formal liberation but also through a critical, introspective awareness that challenges the very stability of reality.
The strength of “Impressionism and Beyond” lies in its ability to present modern art as a unified, complex, and coherent process. The works—rarely seen in Europe—offer an exceptional opportunity for study. The carefully calibrated installation at the Ara Pacis encourages direct comparison, illuminating affinities, ruptures, and evolutionary shifts.
The exhibition allows visitors to grasp the evolution of pictorial language from visual perception to conceptual abstraction. It is an itinerary that reflects the transformation of both the world and European sensibility. For students, scholars, enthusiasts, and international visitors, the show constitutes a high-level critical laboratory.
The return of DIA works to the European context underscores the global dimension of artistic modernity. The dialogue between these two cultural poles reaffirms Rome’s role as a crossroads of art history and as a privileged venue for major exhibitions.
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