This marks the first time the Israel Museum has moved beyond its borders. The Israel Museum of Jerusalem is renowned throughout the world for its collections of Hebrew art and archaeology of the Near East, and for the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Of particular importance is the section of the collections dedicated to impressionist and post-impressionist art. Enriched over the past 40 years by the generosity of collectors from throughout the world, the collection includes masterpieces by Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and the American Childe Hassam, and impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri-Edmond Cross and Edouard Vuillard, together with splendid examples of sculpture by Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas and Aristide Maillol. This is the first time the masterpieces by these impressionist and post-impressionist leave the museum to travel abroad, and in Italy they are being presented exclusively by the Mart, for the inauguration of its lively autumn season.

The exhibition opens with a strong section dedicated to rural and urban landscapes by the "father of impressionism", Camille Pissarro. A crucial figure for the birth and rise of the "nouvelle peinture", he was the oldest member and point of reference for the group; the "humble and colossal Pissarro", as Cézanne defined him. It is he who opens the exhibition with some splendid views of the Seine and countryside around Pariso, opening the way for the enchanting en plein air visions of the great impressionist period. The protagonists are the landscapes, rivers and cliffs of France, but also the areas he frequented in modern Paris itself, as in the intense Boulevard Montmartre: Spring, 1897. Here is a true and new, overwhelming feeling for nature, no longer imitated on canvas but lived in person by the artists. Such as Alfred Sisley, a solitary painter born in Paris of English parents, who explored the pleasant banks of the Loing near Saint-Mammès, leaving a great manifestation of his "water painting".
These are the years of the rise of impressionism, a new way of seeing and of painting, celebrated by the famous exhibition of April 1874 at the studio of the Parisian photographer, Nadar. The research of the group broadened to include new exponents: first of these was Edgar Degas, present in the exhibition with some important sculpture, and a fine draughtsman with a rapid, responsive touch. These were also the years of Pierre Auguste Renoir, celebrated with a section dedicated to him. Following his work of the 1870s, Renoir returned home from a journey to Italy and added to what he had learned from Ingres in terms of colour by introducing the influence of Raphael, Titian and the masters of 17th-century Bolognese art. A splendid example of this mature phase is Portrait of Gabrielle of 1906, in which the artist intensely expresses his vivid love for grace and the female form.
The section on impressionism closes - although without a clear break, in witness of a continuous flow in art - with the masterpieces of Monet.

The room dedicated to the great French painter opens with a splendid view of the cliffs of Étretat. The Norman coasts, which Monet portrayed also in other famous pictures, convey a strong sense of the nature that runs through all of impressionism, with light and colour illuminating the wind-tossed waves and melting all the natural elements into a sublime vision.
With his celebrated "séries", Monet also opened a new season of painting. From his refuge in Givenchy, where he remained until his death in 1926, Monet explored the idea of serial works - as also in his famous views of cathedrals - with sheaves of corn inundated with the yellow light of summer. A highly important work in the French master's oeuvre, the series of sheaves, displayed in the version of "Young women of Giverny", "Sunshine effect", leads the visitor towards the last and perhaps most famous of his series: the lilies.
Monet's studies of the reflections of light and colour on his belowed lily pond at Giverny invites an analysis of nature that is so intense as to go beyond the point from which impressionism itself had started. Monet almost loses himself in the infinite beauty of the effects of water and nature. The subject painted dematerialises: and so the way to the art of the new century is opened!
Between the two major chapters of impressionism and post-impressionism appears a rich section dedicated to sculpture, with the works of great masters such as Rodin, present in the exhibition with such works as Eva of 1881 and lively interpretations of modern life as Balzac naked with folded arms. Alongside Degas, we find Renoir's experiments and an early work by Gauguin, as well as the great classical sculpture of Maillol.
The section devoted to post-impressionism starts with the room dedicated to Cézanne, showing three landscape masterpieces. The research of the master from Aix-en-Provence leads from impressionism to the painting of the 20th century. Cézanne began studying from life but moved towards a saturation of the canvas, on which the "reconstituted" landscape almost dominates in the foreground. As in his famous declaration of wishing to "treat nature through the use of cylinders, spheres, cones", the French painter forms an image that is no longer realistic but mental, overlapping different viewpoints on the canvas.
This marked the dawn of a new season and fruitful developments soon appeared in such movements as pointillisme on the one hand and symbolism on the other.
The section on pointillisme presents the French work on the division of colour, and includes such splendid masterpieces as Signac's "Tugs", "Canal near Samois" and "The Mediterranean near Le Lavandou" by Theo van Rysselberghe. These works illuminate the new century with a joyous explosion of colours, treated in autonomous manner of the natural 'datum' and 'divided' on the canvas to be recomposed by the retina in a supreme intellectual synthesis.
Also part of an avant-garde that is totally of the new century, the pointilliste masters are accompanied in the exhibition by some pictures by Valtat and Braque, the latter in his expressionist phase prior to his meeting with Picasso.
Running parallel to the late impressionists and pointillists, we find the solitary genius of Vincent van Gogh.
Close to the Dutch painter appears another leading figure between the two centuries, who opens the last section of the exhibition, dedicated to symbolism: Paul Gauguin. Present with an important work from his early days, Houses at Vaugirard, still close in style to Pissarro and Cézanne, he inaugurated a new phase in modern painting with his famous period of "exotic" pictures. The villages of Martinique and later of Tahiti lead towards a flat painting in which the bright colour and "closed" forms bear melancholic witness to the "lost paradise" to which he alludes and yearns for.
Together with Gauguin in the same school of Pont-Aven, we find Emile Bernard, whose splendid Portrait of Marie Lemasson of 1892 will be displayed in the exhibition. Pont-Aven was the birthplace of French symbolism, of the Nabis group.
High priests of a new pictorial religion, the Nabis, borrowing from Gauguin, intended expressing "other" values, extraneous to the canvas and the direct perception of nature, through symbolic images expressed with bright colours laid in flat tones.
The exhibition closes with the painting of two extraordinary protagonists: the spatial views, close to Degas, of Pierre Bonnard and the bourgeois intimacy of Edouard Vuillard, with his "Misia on the chaise-longue" of 1900, suggesting a new way of looking at painting, one that would soon be overwhelmed once again by the new major avant-garde movements waiting in the wings.