From an exhibition with a little disappointment

I visited an art exhibition here in Hamburg yesterday. Its title was “From Poussin to Monet. The colors of France”. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was one of the leading French painters in the 17th century during the period of baroque and Claude Monet (1840-1926) was one of the founders of French Impressionism, which is one of the most important painting periods for current understanding of design and of visual illustrations. Between these two painters there was a timeframe of three very eventful centuries including Louis XIV, the French Revolution and Napoleon. Therefore “The colors of France” means not only the influence of French art inside Europe, it also means the influence of the political and cultural upheaval toward French art.

To realize that social changes and the evolution in art are two sides of a coin that is one of the reasons why I am very in fond of arts. Every time it is exciting to find out how a painter or an art period was affected by things that happened in their time or to find out in which way both were influenced by their time. The goal of this exhibition I visited was the same: to show how arts and society are inseparably tied up together. So far so good! But this goal was much too big for a single exhibition with some 200 paintings. There were countless very important painters and a couple of huge painting periods (with a complicated puzzle of sub-periods!) during this length of time! So this exhibition could only be a small spotlight, maybe a kind of an introduction for a series of many other exhibitions which will follow the same main theme. But no other similar exhibition will follow after that one, what a pity…