"The Dream" by Salvador Dali introduces the exhibit's section on the subconscious.
Modern Masterpieces Art exhibit "Monet to Dali" paints a full picture of artistic rebellion
by Michael H. Hodges
It's a modern-art tour even your Manhattan friends might envy.
Until Jan. 18, the Detroit Institute of Arts will host " Monet to Dali: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art," a breathtaking show of 75 works, every one of which seems to have leaped right off the pages of your college art-history textbook.
In a year of dazzling exhibitions following the DIA's reopening last Thanksgiving, "Monet to Dali" is hands-down the most magnificent.
The names alone intoxicate: Monet, Picasso, Cezanne, Modigliani, Braque and Dali, to drop just a few. Nor are these minor pieces.
"This show isn't just about big names," says DIA curator of European modern art MaryAnn Wilkinson. "It's about great works by those big names."
The show neatly complements the DIA's own strengths. As museum director Graham Beal notes, "They've got surrealism. We've got expressionism."
Detroit is rich in German modernism. Cleveland has a treasure trove of French. Taken together, the holdings of the two museums -- temporarily under one roof -- offer a modernist breadth and depth exceeded only by museums in Boston and New York.
The exhibit, which has toured China, Japan, Canada and the U.S.-- Detroit is the last stop -- was originally organized in chronological order.
In keeping with the DIA's new storytelling approach to art, however, they've regrouped the show into five galleries representing themes and moods that weighed on modernists.
Moods from light to dark We enter the exhibition through a gallery devoted to landscapes -- beloved not just of impressionists, but expressionists and cubists as well.
Greeting us right at the start is Claude Monet's 1881 work, "The Wheat Field." This is, on balance, a show rich in Monets.
Just inside the gallery is the 1888 "Gardener's House at Antibes," which fairly crackles with Mediterranean heat and light.
From landscapes, we pass into a darker realm, a gallery devoted to the anxiety and unease prevalent in the early 20th century -- braced as it was, perhaps, for the horrors to come.
Dominant here is the high-water mark of Pablo Picasso's blue period, "La Vie" ("Life"), painted in 1903 following the suicide of a gay friend and admirer, Carles Casagemas.
Vast and funereal, "La Vie" features a naked couple confronting a stern-faced woman in robes cradling a child.
Initially the man in this pair, who appear to cling to one another, was to be Picasso himself.
But after Casagemas' death, the artist substituted the late poet and painter's face -- an ironic insertion, as Wilkinson notes, of a gay man into an ostensibly heterosexual context.
'Radical' works get their due From anxiety, we pass into a gallery that champions radical works that bent the rules and took significant risks.
In many ways, of course, that's almost the definition of modernism, since virtually every new style or school represented a violent -- and often contemptuous -- challenge to what came before.
The impressionist pieces that strike us as ethereal were, hard to imagine, initially denounced in the late -1800s as "mere daubs."
Worth special attention is the 1916 cubist work, "The Coffee Mill" by Juan Gris, whom Wilkinson calls "one of the great, undervalued painters."
While much of cubism is dazzling and provocative, "beautiful" is an adjective that's applied only sparingly.
But there's almost no other word for this carefully constructed still life, painted in sumptuously rich, dark tones.
Subconcious bubbles up The final two galleries touch on works that explore the subconscious mind, and the impact on the modern movement of urban life -- that great constant of the 20th century.
Fittingly, the former is introduced by surrealist Salvador Dali's gorgeously creepy "The Dream," painted in 1931. Since the DIA has no Dalis of its own, this is a particular treat for regular patrons.
The gallery devoted to images of urban life -- defined rather broadly -- holds so many delights, it's a little hard to pick favorites.
Of particular note are Henri Matisse's 1940 "Interior with an Etruscan Vase," and Vincent van Gogh's "The Large Plane Trees," an 1889 work in which tree trunks like towering giants march from left to right, dwarfing people and buildings beneath their sheltering branches.
One of the pleasures of the Cleveland exhibit is the inclusion of some relative unknowns.
In the urban gallery, don't miss George Hendrik Breitner's "Construction Site in Amsterdam," a hauntingly beautiful 1902 work in gloomy grays and browns.
Somewhat more famous, of course, is Amedeo Modigliani, whose 1917 "Portrait of a Woman," with her elongated neck and wistful eyes, mesmerizes.
Modern made accessible At the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is reopening in stages after an overhaul that began in 2005, the man who organized the show says there was a little trepidation at letting such treasures out of their hands.
"When I proposed to our board sending our greatest modern works around the country," says curator of modern European art William Robinson, "there was an audible gasp."
Greatest-hits exhibitions sometimes come in for a little contempt among the fashionable, as if showing works that a majority of visitors might know somehow cheapens the experience.
Rubbish. Very much like going to a live concert, we get an extra zing out of seeing art first hand that we're dimly familiar with.
Given that, "Monet to Dali" is a show that should thrill even those whose background in art history is sketchy, indeed.
Not to worry. By all means, go. You'll be surprised -- and delighted -- at how much you recognize.
