The triumph of colour

After the success of the exhibition Impressionism: Paris and Modernity , the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil (CCBB), in partnership with Fundación MAPFRE and the Musée d’Orsay, brings to Brazil the masters of post-impressionism in the show The triumph of color. From Van Gogh to Matisse, the collections of the Musée d’Orsay and the Orangerie.

The exhibition features 75 works by 32 artists, including Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Seurat and Matisse, showing a generation of artists who became known as post-Impressionists and promoted an aesthetic revolution by use of color.

The exhibition shows how colour at the end of the 19th century freed itself from the more sensitive reality by applying scientific theories about complementary and optical mixing. Linked to Seurat and Signac, during his stay in Paris in 1886-1887 Van Gogh adopted pure chromaticism and the division of the touch of the neo-Impressionist painters. He also admired Gauguin’s research in his use of colour in a symbolist and intellectual way.
Colours applied in flat areas, as in Japanese prints, give a poetic and decorative character to the compositions of the Nabis which were influenced by Gauguin.
This colour revolution took a radical step at the turn of the twentieth century with the Fauves who were to use colour as an independent expressive langua