Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Van Gogh at Ara Pacis Museum
In Rome, the Museum of the Ara Pacis is hosting, until May 3, 2026, Impressionism and Beyond. Masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts. This extraordinary exhibition brings together fifty-two masterpieces by the great masters of modern European art and offers a unique opportunity to admire works by the pioneers of Impressionism Degas and Renoir, the leading figures of Post-Impressionism Cézanne and Van Gogh, the forerunners of the Parisian avant-gardes Matisse and Picasso, and German-speaking innovators such as Beckmann and Kokoschka.
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together masterpieces exceptionally on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the leading museum institutions in the United States, and presents the interplay of visions, experimentation, and revolutions that shaped the evolution of European art between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Through fifty-two paintings, the show recounts the most significant transformations that helped redefine the relationship between reality and abstraction, light and color, nature and the city in modern European painting.
The exhibition layout and the four sections
The exhibition unfolds in four sections, documenting the decisive transformations that contributed to the development of modern European painting, from the origins of French Impressionism to the German avant-garde.
Reality, Modern Life, and Light
The first section focuses on the transformation of French art from the mid-19th century, when realists and impressionists began to challenge academic norms and paint real life and natural light en plein air. Painting becomes experience rather than imitation: vivid colors, shifting light and shadow, and vibrating brushstrokes convey emotions before nature and the changing modern city.
Alongside Sleeping Nude by a Stream (1845) by Gustave Courbet, which turns the traditional nude into an everyday scene, visitors will find works such as Edgar Degas’ Dancers in the Green Room (1879), showing ballerinas in their rehearsal space, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Woman in an Armchair (1874), an image of modern life in loose pose and shimmering color. This section also includes paintings by Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and the German artist Max Liebermann.
After Impressionism
The next section explores the artistic experiments that followed 1886, when, as critic Roger Fry noted in coining the term “Post-Impressionism”, art moved away from direct reality to become more conceptual and personal. Cézanne searches for geometric structure, using color to build volume and depth, while Van Gogh interprets the world through dynamic, vibrating brushstrokes that strongly convey his emotions.
Highlights include Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904–1906), where the landscape is reduced to solid geometric forms that anticipate Cubism; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s White Pierrot (1901–1902), a portrait of his son Jean that blends 18th-century grace with a new modern sensibility; and Vincent van Gogh’s Vase with Carnations (1886) and Banks of the Oise at Auvers (1890), with dense, pulsating paint. Works by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Odilon Redon complete this section.
Fauves, Cubism and École de Paris
The third section focuses on the early decades of the 20th century, when Paris became the artistic center of the avant-gardes and artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse gained international fame.
Six works by Picasso trace key stages of his career: Head of a Harlequin (1905) from the Rose Period; Portrait of Manuel Pallarés (1909) and Bottle of Anís del Mono (1915) from his Cubist phase; Woman in an Armchair (1923) from the Classical period; and the later portraits Girl Reading (1938) and Seated Woman (1940), which echo the graphic intensity of Guernica.
Three paintings by Matisse – Window (1916), The Café (1916), and Poppies (c. 1919) – show his evolution from geometric structure to a freer, more dynamic use of color and light. Works by Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, and María Blanchard – the only woman artist in the Detroit Institute of Arts selection – complete this section.
The German Avant-Garde
The exhibition closes with a section on the German avant-garde, acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts thanks to key patrons and the vision of its director Wilhelm R. Valentiner (1924–1945). Alongside Wassily Kandinsky’s Study for Painting with White Form (1913), a milestone of abstraction, and works by Max Pechstein and Lyonel Feininger linked to Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, most of the paintings here date from the postwar period.
Highlights include Erich Heckel’s Woman (1920) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Evening by the Sea (1919), which convey the drama and tension of those years, and Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Olive and Brown (1945), reflecting the artist’s deep uncertainty after the war. Works by Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka bring the exhibition to a close, testifying to the emotional power of Expressionism.
European Modern Art at the DIA: Wilhelm R. Valentiner and Private Collecting
The exhibition also features a section on the history of the Detroit Institute of Arts, with historical photographs and a timeline of key moments in European modern art from the 1855 Realism Pavilion in Paris to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Until 3 May 2026
Ara Pacis Museum
Lungotevere in Augusta (angolo via Tomacelli)
Opening times: every day 9.30am-7.30pm
Tickets: € 15
