Masterworks From Monet to Matisse (and Many More) Have Landed in Adelaide for a Blockbuster Exclusive Exhibition

“If you lean in closer, you can see the insect footprints,” says Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) curator Tansy Curtin, pointing to a minuscule trail of footprints in the thick sculptural paint of Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers.

Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition opened last week at AGSA. It’s the first exhibition in the gallery’s four Winter Art Series, which will run from 2026 to 2029, bringing masterpieces from international collections to Australia for an Adelaide-exclusive exhibition.

This year, 57 pieces from the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA)’s masterworks travelled to Australia; 56 of those pieces are being exhibited in Australia for the first time. Those 57 works are joined by 30 pieces from AGSA’s own collection of modernist and impressionist masterpieces.

Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Reaper comes from TMA’s collection. It’s one of the 74 works Van Gogh created during the last two months of his tortured and tumultuous life. It’s a vibrant and vital depiction of a windswept field mid-harvest with a reaper working hunched over between sheaves that look as if they’re dancing in the wind.

“When we were unpacking it last week with the couriers from Toledo, they were saying that when they had lent the work to the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands, the conservator there had pointed out the little insect footprints on the surface,” says Curtin. “When the paint was still wet, some little creature walked across the surface. [Van Gogh] was not famous in his lifetime. He received no kind of celebrity or acknowledgement. He sold no works … in a way, it's amazing that a work by Van Gogh even is around today, [and] to have that little moment where you think that while the work was still fresh, a little creature walked across the surface, it really humanises the work for us.”

At the media launch, Curtin echoed this importance of giving South Australians the opportunity to see these works in person. It “reminds people that that a digital image of a Van Gogh is nothing like the real thing”, she said.

Monet to Matisse is an Adelaide-exclusive exhibition, which TMA’s Andrea Gardner describes as a “once in a lifetime experience”. The exhibition was made possible by major renovation works taking place at TMA, which allowed such a large collection of the gallery’s masterworks of impressionism and abstraction to travel simultaneously for the first time.

The exhibition moves through several rooms – many painted in AGSA’s signature bright hues, which bring a new light to the pieces. The exhibition is presented thematically rather than chronologically. It begins with the impressionists, before moving into a room that examines the changing perceptions of the human figure and portraiture as it moved from the realm of the very wealthy into works that celebrate workers, mothers and everyday life.

Then, the exhibition delves into the post-impressionists in a room which features one of Monet’s spectacular Waterlilies, which is presented on a curved wall in a nod to the Musée de l'Orangerie. Then the exhibition examines the fracturing of the human figure with a 1909 Picasso and works of cubic orphism from artists like Robert Delaunay and metaphysical works by Giorgio de Chirico, before moving into the realm of abstraction with Piet Mondrian, Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

Grouping the works thematically rather than chronologically provides “a really a wonderful, in-depth look at this 100 years of art, and it shows you just how quickly and how dramatically art was changing – not in a linear fashion, but in the way that artists are moving in and out of artistic movements”, said Curtin, later pointing out that the exhibition’s bold and modern Mondrian and Monet’s Waterlilies were both painted in 1922.

A hundred and four years later, these very different works are still both deeply moving to modern audiences – and made even more prescient in the context of the collection at Monet to Matisse.

Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition runs at the Art Gallery of South Australia until November 8, 2026.

www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/monet-to-matisse-defying-tradition/

@agsa.adelaide