Art News

Impressionist masters from the Clark Collection on view at CaixaForum in Barcelona

BARCELONA.- In April 1874 the first exhibition was held in the studio of the photogra-pher Nadar, in the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, of a group of painters who had been rejected in the Official Salon: the Impressionists. European art entered into a new stage, marked by a series of very rapid changes that, in just a few years, dispensed with appearance, natural colours, the subject and perspective: the elements that, since the Renaissance, had characterised pictorial representation. When Sterling Clark moved to Paris in 1910, some of the leading artists of this pictorial revolution were still alive. In 1916 Clark bought the painting Girl crocheting by Auguste Renoir, attracted by the colour and sensuality of the feminine image. It was the culminant point of a passion that led him to bring together an extraordinary collection of works of French painting that crossed over from the 19th to the 20th century. Clark did not share the iconoclastic spirit so common in many of the