Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition will be on display at the Art Gallery of South Australia from Saturday, with 57 paintings from the Toledo Museum of Art.
Thanks to renovations at the museum, masterworks from its collection have been sent on tour, including paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Mondrian, Picasso, van Gogh and Renoir.
Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition traverses roughly a century of artistic development, with the title a reminder that styles that might appear familiar today were radical at the time.
"You get a real sense of just how dynamic this 100 years of creativity is," the gallery's Tansy Curtin said.
"It's a time when society is changing dramatically, and so is art."
The show ranges across Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, and arrives at the emergence of a contemporary art world open to a profusion of varied styles.
A highlight is one of Monet's Water Lilies from around 1922, which measures two by two metres.
Painted a full half century after the first Impressionists exhibition in Paris, Monet used dry brushstrokes to create a field of colour that approaches abstraction, Curtin said.
"You're actually looking down into the water lily pond, you've got the greenery, all these textures, the sense of reflection, but no sense of where the horizon line is," she said.
The broad scope of the show means it's possible to see that while Monet was depicting ponds, others had left figurative painting behind altogether.
With its recognisable colour grids, Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black and Gray from 1922 was painted around the same time the Water Lilies hung nearby.
The results of cross-pollination between Europe and the US are also apparent, with another highlight Robert Henri's Cathedral Woods, Monhegan Island.
Its Impressionist sensibilities applied to the deep dark forests of North America.
Having navigated a century of artistic experimentation and massive social change, the show concludes with large-scale abstraction including work by Robert Rauschenberg, in which figurative elements return.
"We've moved from figurative to abstract and come back again, and now we've got this global art world where anything goes," Curtin said.
Alongside the big-name Toledo Museum paintings are works on paper by the same artists, drawn from the AGSA collection - of 46,000 works in the gallery's holdings, the majority are works on paper.
Monet to Matisse is the first part of a four-year initiative by the gallery to mount major international exhibitions during winter.
Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition is on display at AGSA until November 8.
* AAP travelled with the assistance of AGSA.
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