Ways of seeing

The Musee d'Orsay's travelling collection is Australian art's gain, writes Christopher Allen

Masterpieces From Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne And Beyond National Gallery Of Australia, Canberra. Until April 5.

MASTERPIECES from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond is an exceptional exhibition, including not only a generous sample of the work of the eponymous masters but also important paintings by Monet - above all the extraordinary Houses of Parliament (1904) - Degas, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, as well as less familiar names. There is, for example, Gustave Moreau's beautiful Orpheus (1865), in which the poet's head, nailed to his lyre by the murderous Thracian women and cast into the sea, is reverently held by a young maiden of Lesbos.

The reason such a wealth of pictures is available for lending is that the Musee d'Orsay in Paris is renovating the galleries they usually occupy and the works are touring Australia, Japan and the US while this takes place.

But even though Orsay has sent us the equivalent of a leading museum's entire holdings of this period, it will hardly leave its walls bare. The collection is considerable and, as we can see from the details of recent acquisitions, constantly growing.

The Musee d'Orsay is the most recent of Paris's great museums of Western art. It opened in the converted Gare d'Orsay in 1986, although the history of the collection is much longer. After the Louvre opened as a public gallery in the 19th century, the Luxembourg Palace became the home of contemporary art; when the state bought a picture, it was shown there until the artist's death, whereupon it could be considered for promotion to the Louvre.

The expansion of modern painting outgrew this system and the Jeu de Paume was converted to a museum of impressionism, then the Palais de Tokyo became the Museum of Modern Art. In 1977, the Centre Beaubourg or Pompidou Centre was opened for more recent art.

Finally Orsay was established as a home for work from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries; the great paintings of David, Gericault, Delacroix and Ingres remain in the Louvre, but a few works by these artists are also to be found at Orsay, leading on to Courbet, Manet and others with whom the collection really begins; post-impressionism, the subject of our exhibition, is where it logically ends.

As you spend time with the pictures, tour groups pass by rehearsing their inevitable platitudes and well-worn anecdotes. But what really strikes you whenever you engage closely with good painting is the sense of forgetting even those tidy and broadly correct narratives that are like serviceable road maps, and confronting anew the deeply mysterious fact of the painted image.

That fundamental question - what the object of painting really is, what truth the painter seeks - can be encountered in a trecento fresco. But it is particularly obvious, if not inescapable, in the art of the period covered by this exhibition.

The impressionists had renewed the great Western project of picturing the world by shifting the focus to a radical sensory subjectivity, and to the here and now of the instant of perception; but this renewal came at a cost, and a younger generation grew dissatisfied with the dispassionate optical vision and the emphasis on ephemeral experience.

Some rejected the reductive optical approach in favour of rediscovering the life of nature and the representation of emotional experience; others sought a greater stability and constructive rigour in the painted image; exoticism and spirituality, and forms of what can be considered romanticism, realism, classicism and even expressionism all coincided in a movement that cannot be reduced to a single style. Logically, the first of these sequels to impressionism is that of Georges Seurat, whose solution is to pursue the reductive optical tendency to its logical conclusion; in the process, paradoxically, he ends up rediscovering a classical solidity and stillness that had been lost in the love of the fleeting moment.

Seurat is one of the subtlest and most complex artists of this period. His neoimpressionist, divisionist or pointillist technique was based on juxtaposing tiny dabs of colours on the canvas, to be blended by the eye of the viewer rather than the brush of the artist.

He and his supporters considered this way of painting to be scientific, but one has to remember that scientific was the great buzzword of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the most important aspects of Seurat's style was his adoption of a uniform system of dabs over the whole surface of the painting, similar to the way a mosaic is composed of countless tiny pieces of coloured stone. There is no room in Seurat's style for the impasto or virtuoso brushwork of the earlier oil-painting tradition, for expressionistic painterliness or for what art schools call mark-making. His uniform touches emphasise the flat surface of the picture plane and foreshadow cubism's more radical undermining of the distinction between figure and ground.

Even more influential on subsequent generations of painters is Cezanne, perhaps the painter who more than any other makes us wonder what the art of painting is really about. Cezanne is a paradox, though not unique in this respect: he is a genius without facility. Everything in his work is the labour of an extraordinary artistic intelligence, endowed with a deep understanding of form and colour, but for whom picturing the world is always a struggle to be encountered anew.

His human figures are not beautiful but, as in his Bathers, are often painfully awkward, and poignant in their homeless lack of purpose; but without attempting to deny this, he assembles them into groups that recall classical compositions.

There are two great still-life compositions by Cezanne: one of apples and pears arranged in a baroque diagonal, and another later one of onions on a kitchen table, with a more sober classical horizontality. The vivid yet slightly disquieting quality of these pictures comes from the fact the artist studies each object individually in search of its particular character; he does not attempt to fit them all into a rigorous scheme of perspectival consistency.

This destabilisation of rational vision governed by a single viewpoint also foreshadows an important aspect of cubism, but in Cezanne's case it is primarily the expression of concentration on the quality of each individual object. The coherence of perspectival or three-dimensional composition is less important to him than the planar or two-dimensional composition of the objects into a pattern on the pictorial surface.

Cezanne's concentration on his apples and pears is so intense that he strains the limits of the genre. His onions are actually sprouting; he seems to be fascinated by the way that his still life, nature morte, is not dead at all but living, and dying at the same time, since the onion will shrivel as it puts forth its fresh shoots. In the landscape with Mont Sainte-Victoire, too, we can see part of what Cezanne meant when he said he wanted to do Poussin over again, from nature: he applies to this view the same rigorous geometric intelligence that we find, for example, in Poussin's Ashes of Phocion, but instead of composing his work in the studio, Cezanne executes it en plein air and from a given motif, with all its necessary limitations and constraints. He, too, tends to use a similar kind of paintstroke all over the surface, although not in as systematic a manner as Seurat. Thus trees, rock and sky will be made of similar marks, unlike Claude Monet's Study of a Figure Outdoors (1886), in which grass and sky are handled in a completely different way, as indeed they are in earlier painting, too.

Perhaps the single most remarkable picture in the exhibition is Cezanne's portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895-96). The artist felt unable to finish it and no doubt that is why, as with Michelangelo's unfinished carvings, we feel in a sense admitted to the process of creation.

The whole pictorial surface is alive with the sense of the artist thinking about form, tone and colour, construction and harmony. Nothing is routine or simplistic.

The bare pages of the open books are particularly tantalising; the critic's hand hovers over one while he stares into the distance, as though lost in thought. On the floor on the bottom right is a strange pile of papers and books endowed with almost sculptural form by a subtle play of greys and browns: the most minimal form of cool and warm colour respectively, as Terence Maloon, a curator at the Art Gallery of NSW, reminded me in conversation.

It is impossible to look closely at this little pile of books without thinking of the enormous debt of Picasso and Braque to Cezanne; among other things, this play of subtle greys and browns is a foundation of analytical cubism. But as we saw in this column last week, later cubism so frequently became conventional, formulaic and lifeless; it is the struggle with appearance that infuses Cezanne's painting with restless vitality.

Van Gogh and Gauguin are well represented in the exhibition, too, and the contrast between the work, as between the characters of the two men, is palpable in everything from subject to composition, colour and brushstrokes: van Gogh's nervous, gestural marks as against Gauguin's smoother, more sensual ones; and his love of vivid colour contrasts beside Gauguin's rich harmonic effects.

There are three very fine and well-chosen pieces by Toulouse-Lautrec, all images of women from the ambiguous demi-monde or from actual brothels.

The first is of a young woman seen from behind, stripped to a petticoat and stockings, sitting on the ground with legs apart, her thick red hair tied up in a bun and her warm, creamy skin set off against a mass of complementary bluish fabric. In contrast to the intense but implicit sexuality of this picture, the second is a portrait of an anonymous cocotte, her fierce predatory little face vividly painted and the rest of her costume rapidly sketched in paint thinned to the consistency of a wash. Finally, there is an oblique portrait of a female clown who had been a lithe gymnast as a girl but who has now grown fat with age; she is shown apparently unfastening her corset while a waiting gentleman client can be seen in the mirror.

Far from the decadence that fascinated Toulouse-Lautrec, and as far from his brilliant but neurotic use of colour, is another very famous picture, Puvis de Chavanne's almost monochrome The Poor Fisherman (1881), which leads appropriately to the intimist works of Bonnard and Vuillard.

There are two very fine works by Bonnard, one of himself and his wife Marthe, both naked in their bedroom, the other of Marthe lying on the bed, legs askew, disarmingly receptive, while a puff of smoke from the unseen artist's pipe drifts towards her.

There is no eroticism in Vuillard's world but a play of figures in public gardens, deliberately evoked through flat areas of pigment over a sandy or olive underpainting; the sense of design is strong, but the rendering of particular figures is elusive, as though conveying the momentary glimpse of people in movement.

Bonnard's Checked Shirt (1892), and for that matter many other works in the exhibition, reminds us of a principle forgotten by the academic realists of the 19th century: that we don't have to be shown everything, but may be rather prompted to remember for ourselves.