A feast of modern art from the Toledo Museum of Art has just opened at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Featuring some big names – Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Berthe Morisot, Henri Matisse and much more – the exhibition spans innovation, experimentation and social change from impressionism through to abstract expressionism from the 1870s to the 1970s in France and America.

It includes 57 key works from Toledo, augmented by works from the Adelaide gallery’s collection, displayed thematically. It surprises on many levels.

The sheer quality of the Toledo works is undisputable. And this is an exhibition that doesn’t suffer from padding of inferior work around a few masterpieces, as can happen in an exhibition of this kind.

Viewers see wonderful work at every turn such as Charles Sheeler’s Variation in Red (1949), acquired that year, and tucked away in the final gallery.

A trans-Atlantic art history

The Toledo collection tells a trans-Atlantic story. In the late 19th century and into the 20th, American artists were the largest group of expatriate artists in Paris.

Artists such as Everett Longley Warner headed for Paris in 1903. By the time he returned home in 1909, his close study of impressionism takes on a local inflection in Along the Riverfront, New York (1912).

His colourful, light-saturated portrayal of the busy, bustling warehouses and horsedrawn........

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