ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Each new art movement offers a new interpretation of the world, a novel way of representing that which we all see slightly differently. In the twentieth century, it seemed that these ways of seeing were never stagnant, each new decade bringing with it multiple, radical new conceptions of existence. For Roy Lichtenstein, one of the great masters of Pop Art in the American 1960s, his interest was in exploring, subverting, and adapting these representations in ways that spoke directly to the contemporary age. His most famous realisation of these ideas comes in his Benday Dot paintings, where he would reproduce panels from comic books or adverts, meticulously painting a mechanical process of reproduction. Yet, later in his life when he began his ‘Landscape Series’, which this painting is from, he began to flatten his influences into kaleidoscopic beauty. His River Valley contains within it decades of different artistic styles and different interpretations of the natural world, from the expressive brushstrokes and painterly hand to the rigorous lines and modern flourishes - it is an homage to art history, and a declaration that though times have changes, all painters are simply trying to find new ways to see the world.

ALFRED HENRY MAURER

Fusing the composition of Cubist art with the potently affecting feeling of Expressionism, Maurer’s dual heads occupied him for much of his career but it was only in his maturity that they realised their greatest forms. This one, painted just two years before he died from suicide at 64, is haunting. The two female figures become one, though their fusion seems almost unwilling, their eyes filled with trepidation. This uneasy duality was something the artist felt both personally, and in his artistic practice. Maurer began his career painting landscapes in a far more naturalist style, but began to look internally and found within himself a more abstract feeling. “It is impossible to present an exact transcription of nature”, he said, “It is necessary for art to differ from nature. Perhaps art should be an intensification of nature; at least it should express an inherent feeling which cannot be obtained from nature except through a process of association… The artist must be free to paint his effects. Nature must not bind him.”

JAMES CASTLE

In rural Idaho, in the final year of the 19th Century, James Castle was born. Profoundly deaf, he attended school only briefly and never learnt to read, write, or sign properly, he lived a largely uncommunicative life and was only understood by his loving family. Yet, despite his inability to speak or engage with words, Castle had something to say. Developing a sort of charcoal from a mix of soot collected from the fireplace and his own spit, he created hundreds of thousands of artworks using his fingers, sharpened sticks, or peach pits as tools, drawing on found paper and creating books from discarded objects such as this cigarette packet. Unaware of the art world developing around him, his work runs concurrently with the modes and movements across the western world - his own creations often predating mainstream ideas by years. He drew scenes of his domestic existence, of the rural characters he encountered, and the landscape and architecture he loved with an almost photographic memory. He drew across styles, creating works at times naive and abstract and others figurative and exacting - unbeknownst to him, Castle’s mind contained within it an understanding of almost every significant art movement of the 20th century.