Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
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Welcome to Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition… at the Art Gallery of South Australia, on Kaurna country.

In this exhibition you’ll see a century of innovation and experimentation in Western art, from the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art,  in Toledo, Ohio... in the United States.

Never before have so many treasures from Toledo’s renowned collection travelled together and in this audio guide we’ll uncover some of the stories behind them.

I’m Rosa Ellen, an arts journalist and podcast host…and as we look through the exhibition together, I’m inviting you to slow down, and to take your time with these 96 extraordinary paintings and works on paper.

Stand back, and see the composition each artist chose as a way in to their image....

Look CLOSE, and you’ll notice the textures and minute details each painting can reveal to you.

This show covers a hundred-year period that was as full of cultural and social upheaval as our own time… with major technological advances …and two global wars that defined generations.

Monet to Matisse also features a selection from the Art Gallery of South Australia’s own collection… including prints and drawings…that will help you see more in the practice of each of the artists from Toledo’s collection.

Taking the mid-nineteenth century as its starting point, this exhibition introduces two seemingly incompatible art movements – Impressionism and Realism – both of which sought to break away from the traditional storytelling narrative of academic painting … and gave rise to names like Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro and Monet.

From there emerged Post-Impressionism and brilliant oil paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse.

This is also the time that wealthy American industrialists, like the Ohio glass manufacturer Edward Drummond Libbey, began collecting contemporary art from Europe and the U-S… eventually founding public museums …like the Toledo Museum of Art.

And the American artists represented in this exhibition offer a window into changes in the global art world: when men and women from the United States --and Australia-- flocked to the art centres of Paris and London… You can see some of these in the first gallery.

From the 20th century, amid a background of war, poverty and social decline…came the avant garde movements of Surrealism and Abstraction. Here you’ll see how Pablo Picasso, Piet (Peet) Mondrian, Irene Rice Pereira and others... pushed art beyond the representational … evolving to a thrilling period in New York with Abstract Expressionism… exemplified by artists like Helen Frankenthaler (franken-THAHLER) and Richard Diebenkorn.

The works in Monet to Matisse – by some of the best loved and most influential artists in the history of modern art - will take you on a thought-provoking journey, following the themes that preoccupied artists during this turbulent and unprecedented period of history.

Enjoy, Monet to Matisse: defying Tradition.