Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso: the jewels of the Toledo Museum of Art soon in Treviso – Treviso – Arte.it

Treviso – A collection little known in Italy, but keeper of breathtaking masterpieces: it is that of the Toledo Museum of Art, which in the heart of Ohio brings together more than 30,000 works of art, from Pieter Paul Rubens to Pablo Picasso, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Vincent Van Gogh, from Claude Monet to Anselm Kiefer. The Italian public can get a taste of it from November 15, 2025 to May 10, 2026 at the Santa Caterina Museum in Treviso, which is preparing to host a selection of the astonishing collections of modern art so jealously guarded by the American museum that it rarely lends them out. Undergoing renovation and expansion, the Toledo Museum has finally decided to send his works around the world, on a tour that has already reached Auckland, New Zealand, and will soon reach Australia. Treviso, the only stop in Europe, will benefit from a larger number of works: 61 paintings are central to the project From Picasso to Van Gogh. Masterpieces from the Toledo Museum of Art. Stories about painting, from abstraction to impressionismincluding canvases exhibited for the first time outside the American Museum. “It is with great pride and genuine enthusiasm that the Toledo Museum of Art presents to the public of Treviso a selection of masterpieces from its famous Impressionist collection,” he writes. director Adam Levine: “The Toledo Museum of Art has been committed to collecting and presenting modern art for more than a century and has created one of the most important and comprehensive collections of its kind in the United States. Water lilies The more Moths and of the intimate representations of modern life Degasdown to the luminous brushstroke of Renoir and against the silent radicalism of Morisotthe works on display testify to a crucial moment in art history, when perception, light and experience rightly established themselves as subjects worth painting.”

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914-1917, oil on canvas, 200.7 x 213.4 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, inv. 1981.54

But the Treviso exhibition goes beyond the Impressionist horizon and highlights the most important artistic phenomena that followed one another in Europe and the United States between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. On a journey back in time, it presents masterpieces of the twentieth century avant-garde, created by artists such as Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio De Chirico, Piet Mondriaan, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézannewithout forgetting protagonists of American painting, such as Edward Hopper.

Special sections will be dedicated to it themes still life, landscape, figure and portraitwith comparisons between masters that will highlight their evolution. The starting point of the route will be the American abstraction of the second half of the twentieth century with a Ocean Park by Richard Diebenkorn“absolute and at the same time atmospheric composition made of yellow and blue – he explains the curator Marco Goldin – as if that were yellow sand against the infinite blue of the Pacific Ocean. The compactness of heaven and earth, in their harmonious pulsation.”

Robert Delaunay, The City of Paris, circa 1911, oil on canvas, 119.4 x 172.7 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, inv. 1955.38

The same colors are the protagonists of the last painting on display, a canvas with a magnetic attraction: “Almost a century earlier, on the other side of the great sea, ten thousand kilometers away, a painter had ended his life by diving into another yellow, the immensity of the cornfields in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the north of France, under the blue of a sky in which the white sound of confused clouds spread,” Goldin continues. At the Santa Caterina Museum Auvers, Wheat fields with mower by Youncent Van Gogh will have its own space, isolated from the other works: it is the painting with which the painter bids farewell to life at the end of July 1890: “a work that represents with great anticipation the results of a modernity that is arriving and already achieved by him, in the then almost total incomprehension”, Goldin concludes: “A painting that in its absoluteness, by its dripping with color and humanity, represents the very high quality of the works kept in the Toledo Museum of Art”.

Paul Klee, Villas for Marionettes, 1922, oil on cardboard, 29.8 x 24.8 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, gift of Thomas T. Solley, inv. no. 1996/15