I was lucky to visit this exhibition at the Art gallery of South Australia with a few of my fellow French students just days before it closed. Many thanks to frenchwithnicole.com.au for organising the day. What a splendid show it was! And what a beautiful gallery it is. There were not too many people, it was possible to stand in front of any painting for as long as you wanted and, dare I say it, far fewer visitors snapping away with their phones.
Many of the works were familiar from visits to the Quai d’Orsay in Paris but the way in which the show was curated was exciting. The works were grouped to show how these much-loved artists used colour in new ways, starting in the first room with rich blacks and deep tones, moving into a room of snowy scenes with blue reflections, then works of blue and green, then rose and violet. The walls of the various rooms were painted in complementary colours to show off the paintings. A cool lavender for the snowy paintings, a deep blue-green in the blue and green room.
