'Masterpieces from Paris explores the dramatic changes in late 19th century European art through some of the best-known and much-reproduced paintings...
Post-Impressionism announces a break from Impressionism, the revolutionary movement which occurred in France in the second half of the 19th century. By the mid 1880s, artists were experimenting with even more radical ideas...
Masterpieces from Paris reveals cross-influences between artists, and shows the flowering of the modern movements throughout Europe. These fascinating paintings forecast the development of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and led also to Abstraction in the 20th century...'

viewed 2/03/10 http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/masterpiecesfromparis/

The artwork that appealed to me most from this exhibition was one called "War". I cant remember the artists name nor can i find where i wrote it down but in my defence the day i visited the gallery was also the day of my 18th birthday therefore i had a few other things on my mind. Some of the finer details may be a little hazy but i remember this painting consisted of a woman on horseback sporting a sword and a dismembered head. She was jumping over a pile of violently bloodied wreckage of bodies. I believe in its time, this painting would have been seen as extremely confronting to audiences for obvious reasons such as the gore factor but also the dark and almost haunting aura it gives off. My perception of the work is that the painting is not meerly capturing a snapshot of a particular battle scene but rather the girl, in a victorious postion, is symbolic of the idea of war itself triumphing over all people. Hopefully i will soon find the name of the artist so i can read more into what he/she was really trying to achieve with this interesting piece.

One work i was excited to see was Van Gogh's Starry Night purely because it was on a poster that i looked at for six years in my high school art room. To see it was almost like seeing a celebriy in person! ...almost

http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200912/r480020_2439121.jpg
^blogger doesn't want to let me upload the picture of it but theres the link