HENRI MATISSE

In the late 1940s, Henri Matisse put down the paint brush and picked up the scissors. Cut paper became his primary medium, cutting paper into various shapes of vegetal and abstract form, and then arranging them in lively compositions. The cut-outs renewed Matisse’s commitment to form and color as his ability to paint the intricate, emotive works of his youth left him as his body aged. They were questioned everything that had come before, asking the nature of the status of the work of art, whether as a unique object, environment, ornament, or a hybrid of all of these. There is a tension inherent in this, the cut-outs existed between traditional artworks and decoration, they are at once a finished product and a work in process, drawings and colour fields. The cut-outs reduce formal ideas to simplicity, bringing Matisse towards the end of his life back to his most youthful self. Simple, unassuming, and remarkable in their depth.

FRANZ KLINE

Franz Kline was a painter of his own life. He reflected the cultural milieu that surrounded him, and as he moved from figurative work to abstract expression his work never lost a personal representation. In 1940, after years working as a struggling artist in New York’s Greenwich Village, Kline was commissioned by the owner of Bleeker Street Tavern to create a series of ten murals to decorate the watering hole. He was paid five dollars apiece, and the works depict a night at the burlesque show, as requested by the proprietor in an attempt to attract male clientele to his bar. Yet Kline eschewed tradition and expectation, rejecting the graphic work that was standard for such commissions in favour of something altogether more emotional and personal. Kline’s murals mark a bridge in artistic history, the dawn of abstract expressionist work, his loose lines and brushstrokes marking things to come. He imbues his paintings with emotional depth that far exceeded commercial murals of the day, capturing the spirit not just of the burlesque entertainment but of the nation as a whole.

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

Everyday reality crashes into surrealist mythology as perspectives warp and time flattens into a single, unknowable, unplaceable landscape. After a revelation in a Florence piazza, De Chicoro began to paint obsessively, trying to capture the uncanny feelings that could not be translated into anything but painting, allowing for his personal sensitivity to the strangeness of the human environment to create metaphysical works. The works are paradoxical, evoking a feeling of nostalgia as well as novelty, empty, forlorn and hopeless they nonetheless convey a sense of power and freedom. De Chirico condensed the enormity of feeling, the bombardment of daily life into metaphor – inspired by the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, he tried to capture the ominous existence beneath the surface of writing in oil paint. Predating the surrealists, his work established a foundation for warped perspective of existence to speak more truthfully than any attempts at representation ever could.