ROY LICHTENSTEIN

There is the deception of ease in Lichtenstein’s paintings. So accurately does he recreate the medium of comic books and mass production that one can forget the painstaking work he undertook to hand-paint each benday dot, flat plane and standardised type. Recontextualising frames from the comic books, in this case DC’s ‘Girls Romance’, which were experiencing a new renaissance by the early 1960s, he brought the visual language of the masses into high art. By isolating single frames, outside of the narrative in which they were intended, Lichtenstein frees them to interpretation and makes us question why we see them as different worth if shown on the page versus the canvas. “I don’t think that whatever is meant by the artist it is important to art.”, he said. Instead, we are free to interpret these images, conceived first by comic book artist and then by Lichtenstein, however we please. This, ultimately, is the difference between the source material and finished work – removing the context and narrative removes the intention of the artist, leaving the viewer to finish the piece simply by looking at it.

DIEGO RIVERA

What appears at first as a quaint depiction of Mexican street life hides radical and political ideas behind it’s metropolitan idealism. Rivera casts a long shadow across the history of 20^th Century Art, synthesising Pan-American influences, Renaissance frescoes, cubist philosophies, Aztec culture and socialist realism into an aesthetically powerfully and socially engaged oeuvre. Flower sellers were a subject he would return to repeatedly across his career, visiting them in murals, frescoes and paintings, but this is his first ever depiction of the theme that would stay with him for decades. The piece praises labour, it can be read as a celebration of work with the flower seller as it’s hero. It is notably, too, that she sells goods with a purely aesthetic value, and remains dignified in doing so – Rivera saw himself and all artists in the quiet power of the flower selling, ensuring that the work of creation visual beauty was seen as dignified.

GIOVANNI BELLINI

St. Francis steps out into the sun and prepares himself to transcend from his mortal self. Golden rays shine down on him as he receives stigmata, the wounds of crucifixion on your hands and feet, and in doing so becomes something closer to the divine. Bellini, the revolutionary of the Venetian Renaissance, was from a family of artists and, by the time this work was painted, was himself well established and well-trained, with a growing reputation as an artist of singular talent. So it is with total knowledge of conventions that Bellini chooses to break them. Iconographic motifs that appear across religious works and are used as a sort of codex to identify figures by the objects that appear around them or physical characteristics that are exaggerated are totally ignored in Bellini’s representation. Instead, he paints a masterful landscape, worthy of the glory of the divine, and places St. Francis alone, with no angels or heavenly representatives to aide him in his transform, in its beauty.