Impressionism and Beyond. Masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts

A unique selection of works by great masters of modern European art from the 19th and 20th centuries, with 52 masterpieces from the vast collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the most important art museums in the United States and a reference point for collecting European avant-garde art since its foundation in 1885.

Promoted by Roma Capitale, Department of Culture, Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and curated by Ilaria Miarelli Mariani and Claudio Zambianchi, the exhibition at the Ara Pacis Museum goes from the origins of the Impressionist revolution, with its rejection of academic conventions and search for new forms of expression, to the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and the German Expressionist period between the two world wars. Through the paintings of Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many other leading figures in European art, we retrace the birth and evolution of modern painting, the dialogue between light and color, nature and the city, reality and abstraction, and the experiments that redefined the artistic language of the 20th century.

Among the works on display, many of which are rarely exhibited outside the United States, are Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Woman in an Armchair” (1874) and Paul Cézanne’s “Bathers” (1879-1880), paintings that masterfully exemplify the exploration of the figure, light and the construction of pictorial space.