THE HAGUE.- For the first time in its history, the Gemeentemuseum presents a vast display of modern and contemporary art filling two whole floors of its main building. The new exhibition, entitled XXth Century, uses both major historical events like the Wall Street Crash and the Russian revolution and lesser ones like the arrival of the steam railway on Walcheren to suggest the background against which untiring artistic experimentation constantly transformed the face of Western art. Via outstanding works by artists like Mesdag, Toorop, Van Doesburg, Picasso, Constant, Mondrian, Lewitt, Merz, Lüpertz and Baselitz, it reveals a world still inward-looking at the start of the period but increasingly interested in new external developments as time went on.

The leitmotiv of XXth century is the constant urge of individuals and groups to look at reality in a new way. Artists became aware that perception varies from one person to another and one society to another and sought ways of reflecting this diversity in their work. A good example is the opening work in the exhibition: Piet Mondrian’s 1909 Luminist painting, Lighthouse at Westkapelle - an optimistic, Pointillist picture in which the artist seeks to capture the effect of light by applying the paint to the canvas in separate dabs of colour. As the century progressed, the concept of reality became steadily more diverse and personal.

The Expressionism of Egon Schiele, the Magic Realism of artists like Carel Willink, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso, the abstraction of De Stijl, the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, the Minimal Art of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, the Conceptual Art of Joseph Beuys and Bruce Naumann are all attempts to get a grip on the slippery term ‘reality’. By the end of the century, artists were choosing their own version of reality and their own approach to it. Daniël Richter, for example, combines elements taken from history and art history, the mass media and fantasy to produce an entirely individual and inventive style of painting. Jörg Immendorff – scarcely a generation earlier – believes that artists should use painting to convey political messages.

And how do artists relate to politics and society? Should they turn their backs on them or can that self-chosen isolation actually imply a form of social and political engagement? XXth century shows that mass culture versus individualism and love of tradition versus the desire for progress were the poles between which artists – and, indeed, other people – constantly oscillated and made their choices in each new phase of the twentieth century.

Although the history of art always tends to be presented as a straight line, with movements succeeding each other in chronological order, this is not in fact how it happened. The exhibition uses six anchor points in the form of audiovisual presentations to demonstrate that the barrage of artistic developments in the twentieth century cannot be viewed in isolation from major historical events like the two World Wars, the social revolution of the 1960s, the Cold War and the century’s economic crises. The twentieth century was not only a time of change; it was also a time of connections and continuities. That is why the nineteenth century is also a strong presence in the exhibition; it was, after all, only in the twentieth century that its identity was discovered and examined.