Jean-Siméon Chardin,
'The Young Schoolmistress', probably 1735-6.
London, The National Gallery.

Encounters: New Art from Old

14 June - 17 September 2000
Sainsbury Wing and Other Galleries

Sponsored by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter

The history of modern art is often presented in terms of the rejection of the past in favour of new subjects and new ways of painting. Until the early 20th century, art students were expected to study in museums and copy the work of the great masters of the past, but then the new language of Cubism, Dada and abstraction seemed to deny any artistic parentage and was viewed as the original invention of radical young artists for whom the art of the past was irrelevant. The truth, however, is more complex. Artists as various as Picasso, Magritte, Mondrian and Pollock all looked hard at earlier art in developing their own distinctive approaches. The art of the past is as much a factor as society, technology and temperament in fashioning the forms of new art, something that cannot be ignored and demands to be reckoned with.

The National Gallery has always been a resource for artists, and the collection offers many examples of how artists in other times have wrestled with tradition, extracting lessons of relevance to their own art. 'Encounters: New Art from Old' was an exhibition of new work by 24 major living artists (painters, sculptors, photographers, video and installation artists) made in response to paintings in the National Gallery, and showed how some of the greatest artistic personalities of the late 20th century continue to engage with the work of their predecessors. For some, like Kossoff and Freud, this engagement is based on close study of the way an artist paints and is a continual process of technical discovery. For others, like Bourgeois, Clemente and Kiefer, the art of the past is a source of ideas to be interpreted and refashioned in works of a very different kind. The painters they looked at were as various as their responses, ranging from Duccio to Seurat.

The new works made for 'Encounters' demonstrated that the art of the past continues to speak to the present. They allowed everyone who visited the exhibition to share that artistic exchange between old and new.

Exhibition Catalogue

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