These now-soothing pictures still possessed, in those days, what Fry's friend, Virginia Woolf, called "the astonishing power to enrage." But when the English critic Roger Fry first displayed van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and other Post-Impressionists - in London's Grafton Galleries in the fall of 1910 - that was not the case. We tend to greet them now, contentedly, uncritically, as we would old friends. It is no longer easy to see their pictures freshly. It is possible that fame has done these masters a disservice. It was painted by Pellizza, the Italian Divisionist Paul Serusier's "The Talisman," "Skeleton Studying Chinoiseries" by James Ensor of Belgium, "The Dance of Life" by Norway's Edvard Munch, and "Pardon in Brittany," a remarkable salon picture by Gaston La Touche, may not overwhelm the masterworks displayed in the central gallery - this revisionist exhibit does not revise that racically - but they are not embarassed by that $5.2 million van Gogh (with its blocky lovers) or by the other pictures in that room of Cezannes and Gauguins. Among the many virtues of this exhibition is that it brings to our attention unexpected show-stoppers too long overlooked. Works able to compete with pictures of such eminence are not easy to imagine, but in surrounding galleries this show offers many - some by younger masters - Picasso, for example, Vuillard and Matisse - and others made by painters whose names are less familiar because they worked in Italy and Belgium, Switzerland and Norway. So many revered icons of early modern art will not be seen together here in one room soon again. The viewer's eye, now overwhelmed, does not know where to rest, but this room offers more: a wall of late Monets, his water lilles, haystacks, poplars and cathedrals here, too, are the dance hall girls and harlots of Toulouse-Lautrec. Nearby, in static grandeur, hang Seurat's frieze-like landscapes, pictures airy and imposing, built of tiny points of color. Here, too, are the late paintings of the master Paul Cezanne, his bathers and his apples and his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Here, amidst as lavish a display of Paul Gauguins, "Annah the Javanese" reigns in unclothed majesty while a pensive orange monkey guards her sea-blue throne. Here green-eyed Vincent van Gogh, a bandage wrapped around his mutilated ear, confronts us from the center of a whole wall of van Goghs. We know their work from postcards, lecture halls and calendars. At its center is a gallery that seems to be a hall of fame set aside for painters of the highest popularity. POST-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European and American Painting: 1880-1906," which goes on view today at the National Gallery of Art, is a summer exhibition both subtle in its scholarship and stunning in its impact.
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