MITCHELL
Balanced on fragile stalks, the sunflower is a pure concentration of mass and color that forces its way upwards to bloom in splendour, only to droop and wilt so visibly as to almost express the sadness of its mortality. This oddly human quality was exactly what Mitchell saw in the flowers, treating them ‘like people’ and returning to them over 40 years. The title of her works were decided after they were painted, drawing on the feelings and states she was in during their production. So, the Sunflower series are made in momnts of pride and fradility, their frenetic confident brushstrokes a mask for the delicateness of spirit. “If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it”, she explained, “and I draw it, and feel it until its death”.
GOLDSWORTHY
Goldsworthy is not monumental; he is but a vehicle to amplify the world he loves. Small, subtle interventions in the landscape are the root of his practice. Sculptures that last as long as nature dictates, piles of leaves painstakingly organised are dispersed with the wind and formations of sticks live at the will of the tides. In their brief moments of life, Goldsworthy’s works are exemplars of staggering beauty, but this beauty can only exist if we accept that they are transient. Nature is Goldsworthy’s collaborator and his teacher. “I take the opportunities each day offers”, he says, “if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn.”
MARDEN
Inspired by the poems of Hanshan, a 9th Century Chinese poet who lived in willing exile in the mountains where he wrote his poems on rocks, trees and cave walls, Marden created 6 large scale works. Hanshan’s poems are immensely spirituality in the Taoist and Zen traditions, and Marden’s work are implicitly informed by this. Bridging a gap between the real and the imagined, the formal and the abstract, the natural and the unnatural, Cold Mountain 6 is about the in-between space where peace lives. He painted the canvases from the bottom to top and left to write, so as to mirror the Chinese writing system and in this way the painting can be seen also as calligraphic abstractions. What is left behind when we remove meaning from beauty?
GIOTTO
Across the gulf of two eras, Giotto built a bridge. Out of the Byzantine tradition of flat, sharp and highly decorated art, he launched a revolution from a single building, armed with wet plaster, paint and a brush. That building was the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and over two years Giotto painted a biblical narrative in immense frescoes that would inform the future of painting. Widely considered the father of the Renaissance, it is his work in Padua that warrants the claim. Here, death, mourning and resurrection as played out in a single scene. A Byzantine influence is clear: the gold halos that adorn the figures, moments of angularity in the faces and the decorative borders that surrounds it. Yet compositionally, Giotto was doing something radically new. The overlapping figures creating a sense of depth, the rising path that balances the work in two, the open display of emotion – all of these were to become trademarks of Renaissance painting but in 1305 it was miraculous. Giotto literally added a new dimension to painting, transforming flat planes into something that could represent the three-dimensional world. But he also added the dimension of emotion, and paintings became vehicles for expression and catharsis under his legacy.
KELLY
“To hell with pictures”, said Ellsworth Kelly, for he does not paint pictures in any traditional sense of the word. Instead, Kelly’s works are imposing studies of tension, geometry and colour, so striking in their scale and vibrancy that the flat plane seems to metamorphosize into three dimensions. Kelly came back to the composition of ‘Blue White’ many times after its creation, the moment of contact between two enormous, abstracted forms became a recurring motif. Yet, on repeated viewing, the planes shift and the blue forms become the background to hard edged white shapes trying to cut their way through. Kelly did not want meaning ascribed to his work, he simply wanted them to be absorbed and, through this absorption, have the viewer question their perception.
CÉZANNE
Cézanne wanted to conquer Paris with an apple. Using the simplest of objects, he created a new vernacular of painting. If the work looks beautiful but not revolutionary today, that is because Cézanne succeeded in his mission. In fact, in this simple depiction of seven apples, so many of Cézanne’s groundbreaking ideas and techniques are on show. Multiple perspectives, geometric reduction, visible, almost emphasised, brushstrokes and a modulation of colour. Using an apple, Cézanne broke every rule available. Using an apple, Cézanne did in fact conquer Paris. “He is the father of us all”, said Picasso and Matisse, and in that sense he became the father of modernity.
MONET
While not the originator of the movement, Matisse’s poetic work of light and atmosphere gave the Impressionist’s their name. Painted in the wake of France’s emergent industrialization, Monet’s painting was a statement of individuality. When reproduction has become easy, and exact copies are the domain of machines, expression must come in the form of spontaneity and feeling. The work is not unfinished, but instead full of potential for what could be as modernity starts to infringe on the present. Thus, the hazy, rich colours, relaxed, free flowing brush strokes, and luminous palette that depict the port of Monet’s native town make no attempt at representing the real, but instead serve as a vision of utopia.
SARGENT
Not as much a portrait of girls as a portrait of childhood, Sargent’s most psychologically compelling work moves between beautiful and unnerving with each view. The four sisters are placed in their Parisian front room, ordered by age, with the youngest at the front and the oldest retreating into the shadows, a dark passageway behind her. The girls are wooden in their poses, so much so that the work has been called a still life, while the scenery, particularly the large Japanese vases, seem alive and dynamic. The work is temporal, time unfolds away from us as the children grow up and are moved away from the clarity of innocence into the dark unknowing of adolescence.
BRANCUSI
Two lovers are dissolved into a pure, single, abstract form in the first sculpture of modernism. Brancusi’s choice of a kiss to make this radical, revolutionary action was no mistake. In a fell swoop he was situating himself in pantheon of art history and making all the painted and sculpture depictions of romance that came before him seem old fashioned. Throughout the rest of his life he would come back again and again to this sculpture, creating new versions that were simpler, more formalistic than the ones before. Yet here is the first, a proto-cubist rendering that reduces the most natural of acts into art that approaches geometry. Inspired by African, Assyrian and Egyptian art, ‘The Kiss’ created a new language of Western Sculpture by subverting one of its most sustained motifs.
TURNER
For the specificity of its title, Turner’s work of ‘Canale Della Guidecca’ is full of inaccuracies, half-truths and imagination. Most of the buildings pictured are non-existent, and those that are have been moved from their locations for the sake of balance and beauty. Yet John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of his time, said ‘without one single accurate detail, the picture is the likest thing to what it is meant for – the looking out of the Guidecca landwards, at sunset – of all that I have ever seen’. Turner’s genius was that he was able to capture the essence of a place or an event, and he understood that essence was more about the feeling it provoked than anything else. You can stand at the Guidecca today, look out towards sunset, feel the calm, gentle, soft majesty wash over you and know that Turner’s painting might not have been accurate, but it was truthful.
CARAVAGGIO
It is fitting, perhaps, that all that remains of Caravaggio’s hand in this painting is the Angel Gabriel. Subject to centuries of restoration, the painting has become almost a Frankenstein’s monster of retouching, preservation and repair. Yet Gabriel, floating above the Virgin Mary in a billow of clouds, has needed little of this work. Instead, the hand of the master is evident and all the more potent for it; Gabriel seems to emerge from the paintings plane in luminosity, escaping the confines of the canvas and floating between our world and the one Caravaggio depicts. Known for using everyday people as life models for religious figures and bringing his contemporary experience into his religious paintings, Caravaggio does not deify the Virgin Mary. Instead he presents her as an almost tragic figure, prepared for the burden required but crushed by the expectation. Caravaggio brought images of the Bible down to his modern world and with his brushstrokes elevated them to something divine.
BLAKE
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and William Blake are natural bedfellows. Shakespeare’s most wild, inventive and dreamlike play suited a man who saw imagination as “human existence itself”, and Blakes drawing of the final scene embodies nature and emotion over logic and reasoning. The four fairies dance in a circle, jubilant and joyful with their linked lands creating infinity. Oberon and Titiana stand aside, almost fearful of the scene ahead of them for these fairies are nature themselves, feminine, untameable and sexually free. Blake interpreted Shakespeare’s work to align with his worldview, and free love was an essential part of that. A unique mind, he saw visions of a potential world where humans would return to natural, primal states that would create an honest society.
VUILLARD
Édouard Vuillard was part of a secret society of artists known as ‘The Nabis’, who saw their role as to move art away from naturalist Impressionism into a synthesis of metaphors and symbols that more accurately represented perception, if not reality. The group had disbanded by the time this work was created, and Vuillard had been painting realistic interiors, mostly of women in their home. Yet beneath the surface of these seemingly straightforward works we can see the influence of his avant garde origins. An obsessive studier of objects, everything he painted held relevance to the sitter, with each object acting as a metaphor for a facet of their personality, and he drew a connection between the interiors of the home and the interior of his sitter. He did not see these works as portraits, but as stolen moments that extended beyond the subject and came to represent society at large.
KIPPENBERGER
Kippenberger let the stationary guide him. Over the course of his short life, he drew hundreds of works on Hotel Notecards he collected on his travels, often from hotels he never stayed in. Exceeding their origin as preparatory sketches for wider works, the hotel drawings became a constant source of reflection, almost diaristic in nature. Kippenberger drew self portraits from that day, surrealist renderings of his emotional state. He drew Frank Sinatra, scientists, graphic posters, cartoons, the hotels themselves, but while they are frenetic in their multitude, each taken alone offers a surprising calm. A staggering technical ability is evident, and a breadth of style remarkable, the story of the letterheads, and of a rambunctious, nomadic life that it tells, is offset but a profound sense of self, and of calmness within that self.
CALLE
In February 1981, the conceptual artist Sophie Calle was hired as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel. As she cleaned each of the twelve rooms, she not only documented the belongings of the guests but, in some way, became them. She used their perfumes, the contents of their make up bags, ate their leftover food, tried on their clothes. She rummaged through suitcases and read diaries. In Room 47, a family of four was staying. They bored her. Her unashamed voyeurism sought something more, something different. The resulting artworks appear as diptychs. One frame contains Calle’s written observations not only of the contents of their rooms but of details of their lives, parsed from the detritus. How much can we learn from the contents of someone’s suitcase, and how much can we become them from fleeting impersonations?
WEEMS
Radically simple, Carrie Mae Weems’ portraits, known as the Kitchen Table Series, offer a picture of universality. In 1989, Weems began setting up her camera at the end of the kitchen table, a single hanging light and a door frame behind her the only other decoration. Over the next year, she took portraits of a fictional life, a romance leading to a break-up, sadness leading to contentment. Within her four walls, it is hard not to see our own. The minutiae and mundanity of everyday existence becomes something profound and palpable in Weems’ images. As she says, ‘This woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide.’
FINSTER
A folk artist with visions from God. Finster paints with an untrained hand and creates something closer to the truth than training can give you. Reminiscent of Giotto, his flat planes democratise the world he exhibits. Elvis becomes a religious icon, existing on the same dimension as the organic forms that dance around him like a halo. Finster used figures from culture repeatedly, warping perspectives of time and place to draw allusions between the holy world and the one he lived in. For Finster, anything could be religious, and art was the vehicle to explore it. He believed God asked him paint 5000 works, and he far exceeded this call.
VAN EYCK
Hubert and Jan Van Eyck heralded the artistic end of the Middle Ages and the Ghent Altarpiece is their crowning achievement. A work of staggering, exacting beauty — it is reverent in its portrayal of divinity while still grounding itself in earthly presence. This marked a departure from the overarching symbolism and flat, matter-of-fact compositions of the work that came before. Instead, the Van Eycks championed observation of nature and human representation as a means to approach holiness, focusing the attention of the religious pilgrim to himself and his place on earth, as opposed to the idealisation of Christian spirituality. God sits above, centred, in royal garb, flanked on either side by the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. Angels play heavenly music and Adam and Eve complete the edges of the upper row. Below, scenes of pastoral prayer play out, watched over by the dove of the Holy Spirit. The human, mortal world literally holds up divinity. It was a radical suggestion — that the everyman is not just worthy of representation but is necessary in the story of God, though the hierarchy is clear. It is generally accepted that, after Hubert’s death in 1426, the younger Jan van Eyck took up his stead and completed the painting, when it was then displayed in St. Bavo’s Cathedral where some 600 years later it still stands today. It is amongst the important pieces of Western art ever created, laying the foundations for the Renaissance and changing the very world it sought to represent.
POLLOCK
A seminal early work by Pollock, Guardians of the Secret was a synthesis of disparate influences into a supremely modern work. Long inspired by the Native American art that he saw as a child growing up in the American West, Pollock visited the Indian Art Exhibition at MOMA with his Jungian analyst in 1941. The totemic forms of Guardians pay homage to Native American art while exploring his own warring psyche. Pollock saw art making as an attempt to heal himself, a shamanistic, religious ritual that gives over to chance, in the same way that Native American sand painting was seen as a healing practice.
HAMMONS
On the corner of Cooper Square, opposite Cooper Union where Hammons taught lessons on material specificity and conceptual reverb, David Hammons laid out a North African rug, arranged various snowballs of different sizes and began selling his wares. Alongside counterfeit designer good, jewellery and army surplus vendors, wearing inconspicuous garb, Hammons was making a statement. The nature of that statement, even after 40 years of academic analysis, remains vague. Hammons, one of the most important contemporary artists, has always existed with intention outside of reach of the art world. The work is almost an idiom, the literal action absurd and ephermeral. It is a work with the sole purpose to evade us, or as Hammons says, ‘don’t you know, chasing these stories is what is is?’.
PENONE
Guiseppe Penone lay down in a pile of leaves and breathed. He breathed nature and left his imprint. The work is transient and in a state of constant change. The slightest move from the spectator will be enough to move a single leaf and change the construction. Penone made art outside of the system. Alongside a small group of Italian artists, he developed a genre known as Arte Povera, or poor art. Creating work from limited, affordable resources, both natural and man-made, he questioned the means of production and the human relationship with nature. He did not strive for immortality; his work will be carried away by the wind.
MONET
Monet returned to the beaches of Normandy again and again. Raised nearby, the limestone cliffs and natural arches embedded themselves in his psyche from childhood and Monet would escape the Urban environment to obsessively paint the rock formations. He was relentlessly in his documentation, capturing every viewpoint, at every time of day. He became a hunter of change, studying the way the moving light altered the colours and shadows. He would paint up to five of six canvases a day, abandoning them as the changing sky dictated. Monet’s whole life can be told in his paintings of Porte D’Aval – the appearance of the rocks changes not just with time but with the man, with his mood and experiences. As with all obsessions, Monet projected himself onto these arches, beach and sea, drawing them as if out of necessity.
HUNT
Itself derived from Boccaccio’s Lisabetta, John Keats’ Isabella mirrors the Decameron original - the tale of its titular protagonist, centred around the murder of her lover at her brothers’ hands. Though his body is hidden, his spirit remains long enough to inform her of the tragedy; leading Isabella to exhume the body before burying its head in a pot of basil, which she spends the rest of her days caring for obsessively, convinced that Lorenzo’s voice still carries from the soil. The poem served as inspiration for many of the great Pre-Raphaelite painters; particularly William Holman Hunt, who immortalised his wife Fanny’s features as Isabella after she died during the painting’s creation.
DAVIS
The earthen pool is lined with umber bodies. Frozen headlong, a boy is captured middive into a turquoise pool, his fellow swimmers similarly caught in stillness. The scene is fuzzily painted - an artificially shallow depth of field, this moment focused upon the diving figure while blurring the other poolgoers. Davis’ control over his palette is reminiscent of the functioning of memory — capturing and recording certain details or foci, but never quite managing to condense into the moment it originally was. The result is a decidedly analogue effect, a faded postcard from a resort long passed by. Davis drew from quotidian scenes like these often, but it is their very mundanity that in turn infuses them with both livelihood and meaning. He painted everyday magic, permutating his subjects from the mediocre into a sun-slick fantasy.
TITIAN
Titian’s The Resurrection had many inspirations, ranging from ancient sculptures to religious frescoes but most direct of all was his own painting Polyptych of the Resurrection, painted some 20 years earlier. It is, however, bolder, brighter, more affecting than its inspirations, it is glorious in its depiction of Christ rising from his tomb. The power we feel looking at the work is matched by the figure's awe in the lower half. The undisputed master of the Venetian Renaissance, Titian was stylistically restless throughout his life, maturing and changing, updating and revisiting his oeuvre. The confidence of his youth gave way to a self-critical maturity — he became an obsessive perfectionist, working on single paintings for up to 10 years and re-imagining the early work which gave him his fame and fortune. The Resurrection, originally part of a diptych for a processional Banner for the Corpus Domini brotherhood in Urbino, is a shining example of this revisionism. Titian made his past the muse for his present, and achieved perfection in the process.
LANDY
On the morning of February 10th, 2001, Michael Landy owned 7,227 objects. 14 days later he owned nothing but the clothes on his back and 5.75 tons of powdered consumer and personal goods. In a disused storefront, Landy and a team of technicians, mechanics, assistants and artists loaded up everything Landy owned - artwork, clothes, family heirlooms, a Saab 900 Turbo, newspaper clippings, expired spices, defunct AV equipment, range ovens, living rooms chairs - onto a specially constructed conveyor belt and began breaking them down. Each object was disassembled and then pulped and powdered until nothing remained. It is an artwork with no tangible end product.
JARMAN
Derek Jarman trawled the shingles of Dungeness Beach, in the shadow of the Nuclear Power Plant, picking up lost objects. He did the same in flea markets in London. Jetsam and detritus became his inspiration for his series of Black Paintings. Using the same tar his cottage was coated in as the base, he created these assemblages as he began to die from HIV. They can be read as Memento Mori, indeed some can even be seen as abstract headstones, but they are not about the inevitability of just Jarman’s death. They are about the collective, the past owners of these lost objects, and the uniting of them together in something literally dead - tar. So they are about the inevitability of dying but too the will to live. Jarman saved objects and gave them life, he joined together the rejected to create a unified new.
ARP
Arp saw chance as his greatest collaborator. Throughout his career, working across almost every medium available to him, Arp bridged the gap between 20th century art movements, but his breadth belies a consistency of thinking. Arp worked with form first, generating shapes and letting the artwork move from there. The conscious mind was a hindrance in creation – natural forms dominate his work and he presents visual information as an alien seeing it for the first time. The father of Organic Abstraction, his titles were the last element of any work to be considered. Here, a yellow circle is the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we are close to them all.
KLINT
For Hilma af Klint, whose forays into abstract art were perhaps the first to occur in the Western world, swans were stepping stones - symbols of the otherworldly wisdom that higher beings Georg and Ananda allegedly imparted upon the painter during a spiritual seance in 1904. The majestic swan symbolised the ‘grandeur of the spirit’ in Theosophy, a spiritualist movement of great interest to Klint; in alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher’s stone, or the power to transform base metals into gold. In the Swan series, af Klint blends established symbolism with her own idiosyncrasies, progressing from figurative swans to geometric forms suggestive of the higher dimensions she sought.
LEIGHTON
Flaming June is a work of painterly deception. The work is so striking, so classically beautiful, conforming to aesthetic ideals and sacred geometry of the golden ratio that it’s real tricks are hidden from us. Leighton was a classicist, a holdover from a generation before him and even while revered in his time, he was out of fashion before he reached old age. Yet hiding in this classical work is something profoundly modern because this is not a portrait of a sleeping woman so much as an investigation of form and colour. The model is contorted in an impossible shape, she becomes a circle. The elongated thigh, brings her body sweepy into geometry, housed in a perfectly squared canvas. This work exists across planes. You are drawn in by an exquisite, delicate rendering of a lazy spring day, and it is only your subconscious that sees the natural, minimal forms of the work.