“Even if such works may legally be owned by an individual, in a higher sense they belong to everyone, their owner is only their custodian.” – Oskar Reinhart, 1939
Edgar Degas’ Two Dancers on a Stage, painted in 1874, sits in the middle of the two galleries that house this major new exhibition at the Courtauld,. It’s a work familiar from umpteen chocolate boxes and biscuit tins. A pair of young ballet dancers in ruffles of net and pink ballet shoes rose wreaths wound around their neat heads, are poised on the edge of a stage. For us, there’s a tendency to see this painting as simply charming and sentimental – so ubiquitous have Degas’ dancers become – rather than experiencing it as the innovative work it then was. The view is unconventional as if we are sitting up in a box watching the stage at an angle. There’s also the fact that to paint actors and dancers in the late 19th century, those who inhabited the demi-monde, instead of nymphs and shepherds or figures from history, was considered transgressive.
Impressionism has become so familiar to us and is such a warm bath of visual delights that we easily forget what a radical movement it was. That it was the strength of the artist’s sensation and not his (it was nearly always his) skill, that assured the ‘truth’ of representation. ‘Sincerity’ gave art its character, making it into an act of protest against the prevailing social order and painterly styles. There were depictions of life in all its complex, fragmented vitality. Arguably, the first modern art movement, with its visible brushstrokes and unblended colour that emphasised the depiction of natural light, Impressionism was born out of modernism’s growing preoccupations with the self, individualism and subjectivity. Society was shifting away from the church as the prevailing institution, from fixed notions of God and traditional societal structures, to focus on personal responses to people and nature
The Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur, Switzerland, is one of the most remarkable museums of its kind with a collection that ranges from old masters to Post-Impressionism. Assembled in the first half of the 20th century by Oskar Reinhart, whose family was associated with one of the world’s leading trading companies, Reinhart was a contemporary of Samuel Courtauld, with whom he shared similar tastes.
Lucidly capturing the power and radicalism of Impressionism, this show displays some of the highlights of his collection, and opens with Francisco De Goya’s still life, Three Salmon Steaks. Superficially this painting might seem to fit in to the tradition of still life painting, particularly loved by Dutch artists, but Goya painted this during the tumultuous Peninsular War of 1807-14 between Spain, Portugal and Great Britain against the occupying forces of Napolean. A way, perhaps, of avoiding censorship and speaking directly of war, the two pink lumps of raw fish have all the visceral intensity of flayed flesh, the dark central section of the salmon’s spine reading like a bullet hole or rapier wound.
We see a more compassionate, ‘modern attitude towards ‘madness’ than the stigmatising 19th century views that likened mental illness to demonic possession or moral deviance in Théodore Géricault’s powerfully poignant, A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank. Painted between 1819-22, Géricault portrays his protagonist with dignity and sensitivity, dressed in a tasselled police cap, his hospital ward tag worn like a badge of honour.
Nature was a strong presence in early modernism. In Gustave Courbet’s 1870 The Wave, the artist captures the sea’s roaring power, crashing onto rocks under a stormy sky. The use of a palette knife, rather than a brush, gives the wave both weight and solidarity, linking Courbet with the tropes of the Romantic poets and painters such as Caspar David Friederich, with their awe of the natural world. In contrast, Gustave Courbet’s The Hammock 1844, a painting of a young girl dreamily swinging in a canvas and rope bed slung between trees, is deliberately controversial. Lying in erotic rapture, the young woman wears modern dress, placing her in the contemporary world rather than safely in the past. Surrounded by fleshy pink roses that frame an inviting orifice of light, her bodice is casually unfastened to expose her breast, the breast of a modern girl, not a nymph. It’s not hard to connect this painting to the infamous depiction of the vulva of a naked woman, in Courbet’s The Origin of the World.
Daily workaday life was explored throughout Impressionism. In Alfred Sisley’s Barges on the Saint-Martin Canal 1870, we are presented with a scene of boats being unloaded at their moorings, opposite a laundry barge on the far bank. Elsewhere, Monet immerses his viewers in the blues and greys of a freezing winter’s day on the Seine, with its ice flows and bare poplars. The long, smeared almost abstract brush strokes merge with their reflections in the river to give a visceral sense of the cold.
While there is only one early Gauguin on show, (apparently Oskar Reinhart was unconvinced by his later style), there are several Cezanne’s. The Pilon du Roi, of 1887-88, depicts the rocky outcrops of the Étoile mountain range in the south of Aix-en-Provence, and is key to Cezanne’s attempt not to ‘imitate’ nature but to attain a ‘harmony parallel to nature’. Oskar Reinhart, like Samuel Courtauld, shared a particular commitment to the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh, assembling some of the latter’s most poignant and autobiographical paintings: the inner courtyard garden of the hospital in which he was incarcerated in Arles, and the men’s ward where inmates huddle around a large iron stove, the unstable lines and vertiginous floor adding to the sense of instability.
This small exhibition put together from the masterworks from Reinhart’s collection, shows how the great entrepreneurs of earlier centuries were able to build important art collections. Oskar’s father, Theodor, who also collected art, amassed a fortune working in his wife’s family textile business that traded cotton from India, leaving his son free to travel and collect art. Like Dr. Barnes, in Philadelphia, who made his vast wealth in the pharmaceutical business and then built a considerable art collection, the Oskar Reinhart collection shows the benefits of the philanthropy of these extremely wealthy and powerful men, with their keen eyes and wit to buy what was new and not yet fashionable.
Photos © Artlyst 2025
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, award-winning poet and novelist. Her latest novel, Rainsongs, is available from www.duckworthbooks.co.uk and her fourth, Flatlands, is due from www.pushinpress.com in 2013.
Her latest poetry collection, Swimming to Albania, is published by www.slamonpoetry.com. Her series of poems on the artist Gwen John, God’s Little Artist, is due from www.serenbooks.com in 2013