Broncia Koller-Pinell, The Artist’s Mother (Die Mutter der Künstlerin), 1907, oil on canvas, 91 x 77.5cm © Artothek des Bundes, on permanent loan at the Belvedere, Vienna

TAKE a number of snapshots of cultural turmoil in Europe between 1886 and 1914 and you have the frenetic backdrop to a new National show.

MaryAnne Stevens, curator of the gallery’s After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, says: “In this exhibition we seek to explore the complexities of a period in art, and in wider cultural manifestations, that can assert the claim to have broken links with tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

With a hundred or so paintings and sculptures representing the numerous and fast-changing shifts of alliances, collaborations, locations – indeed, of individuals’ styles – the aim is ambitious; to look at artists in relation to the move away from naturalism and their efforts concerned with a drive to the “modern”.

Spectacular international loans include those rarely seen from private collections. Among the paintings and sculptures featured are works by such as Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and many more.

In addition to a Cezanne and two Rodin sculptures, the opening room features The Sacred Grove, 1884, by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the artist described by Van Gogh simply as “the master of all of us”.

Next comes, Pivotal Figures, a section presenting Cezanne, Gauguin and notably Van Gogh, with breathtaking private collection paintings of his outstanding, among them Sunset at Montmajour and Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, both from 1888.

The exhibition recognises the artists’ experimentation and Paris as the artistic capital of the period, but other European cities are highlighted.

The “reconsideration of form, surface and space” and moves away from “representation towards simplification of form, patterned surfaces and an increasingly fractured, mosaic-like application of colour” is also explored.

Gauguin’s symbolism and innovation is stressed, with his Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), a highlight; but there is also, intriguingly, his rare seascape The Wave, a modest painting but so flat as to startle.

“Pictorial symbolism” is the focus of works made during the 1890s in a section devoted to a group of young French artists that formed “The Nabis” or prophets.

The journey, or “drive towards a new visual language”, continues – from the work of the Fauves “wild beasts”, under André Derain and Matisse – via Barcelona and Brussels and Vienna and Berlin and artists such as Jan Toorop, James Ensor, Klimt, Kollwitz, and Edvard Munch, among others.

Vienna saw women prominent in the avant-garde scene and a particularly fine example of a modern take on a traditional theme is Broncia Koller-Pinell’s The Artist’s Mother, 1907.

The show closes with “some of the most significant modernist works, ranging from expressionism to cubism and abstraction”.

Highlights here include Kandinsky’s Bavarian Village with Field, 1908, Piet Mondriaan’s Tree, 1908, and cubist works from Picasso, for example, Woman with Pears from New York, and Georges Braque, The Castle at La Roche-Guyon, from Stockholm, both 1909.

• After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, until August 13. Tickets / details: www.nationalgallery.org.uk