Curated by Simona Bartolena

The exhibition offers 60 works, including oils, watercolors and graphics, coming from the prestigious South African art gallery, able to retrace well over a century of international art history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the second century, through its major interpreters, from Courbet to Corot , from Monet to Degas , from Rossetti to Millais , from Picasso to Bacon , from Lichtenstein to Warhol and many others.

The story ideally starts from the English nineteenth century and from two works by William Turner and continues with the painting by Alma-Tadema , The death of the firstborn, a refined and melancholy scene set in a dark and imaginative Egypt, and with the works of two gods. major exponents of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The exhibition continues with a large section dedicated to the results of late nineteenth-century painting and opens with those painters who chose a new approach to life in painting. The Impressionist generation, introduced by authors such as Eugéne Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind , is represented by Edgar Degas , Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley.

The path continues with some protagonists of the post-impressionist scene: Paul Cézanne , Vincent Van Gogh , Pierre Bonnard , Edouard Vuillard .

Crossing the threshold of the twentieth century, one encounters the works of two of the most celebrated masters of the century: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso who open up to the new demands of contemporary art, with Ossip Zadkine and others. There is no shortage of exponents of the second half of the century: the British Francis Bacon and Henry Moore , and the two protagonists of American pop art Robert Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol , whose triptych dedicated to Joseph Beuys is presented.

The exhibition is ideally closed by the section that investigates the art developed in South Africa in the twentieth century. In particular you can admire the works of Maggie Laubser , one of the exponents of South African expressionism and the works of Maude Sumner, Selby Mvusi and George Pemba , painters with strong interests for the social who tell the traditions of the country, but also urban life and the reality of Apartheid.