The+Impressionists'+Gardens

IMPRESSIONIST GARDENS, a relaxing exhibition When you think of a painter, the first image that comes to your mind is probably a hatted, dirty-handed guy depicting a beautiful landscape in the midst of the country-side. This is the way in which most of us conceive of painting, as a pleasure (I can confirm it) for people who produces nice and decorative pictures for our art books or calendars or, more rarely, our living rooms. Such a bucolic and romantic stereotype, including as subjects all sort of flowers and plants, interior gardens and urban parks, is currently developed at two prominent exhibition halls in Madrid: the Thyssen Museum and Caja Madrid Foundation. The exhibition, chronologically organized, opens in the galleries of the Thyssen Museum with the forerunners of the impressionist garden in the romantic age (represented by Delacroix) and continues with the Barbizon School (Millet, Corot, Daubigny), who turned to the outdoors and explored the garden as scenery. At that time, the garden appears as the meeting point between the urban and rural worlds. After those immediate predecessors, Monet and the French impressionists discovered in the parks of Paris the combined attractions of modern life and the outdoors. On the other hand, we find the garden as a productive place in the pictures of Pisarro, with his particular focus on the figure of the peasant at work. Further post-impressionists like Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh were influenced by his lessons. The Caja Madrid Foundation halls are devoted to the evolution of the subject of gardens in the late work of the impressionist and post-impressionist painters (including Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and Klimt). The exhibition also allows you a peek over a wide range of European and American painters who focused on effects of light and outdoor atmosphere, such as Sorolla and Regoyos in Spain. The last room looks at the transformation of the garden as subject in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th-century (Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism). If you’re visiting the centre of Madrid for shopping, you shouldn’t miss this pleasant promenade through the most lively coloured gardens in the world and you thus could experience an inexpensive “eye-therapy” for the soul. Guillermo De Juan