JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD

Derided for its frivolity, ‘The Swing’ came to represent the best and worst aspects of 18th Century French High Society. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the painting, a masterpiece of Rococo, as emblematic of the rotten core of the whole era - extravagant wealth concerning itself with eroticism and playfulness, existing in a fantasy world removed from reason, rationality and truth. Yet ‘The Swing’ has persisted as a great work for these reasons and more. An aristocratic woman is pushed on a swing, her shoe flying off her feet in exuberant ecstasy, as her lover hides in the bushes below, glimpsing up her dress with each swing. It is lewd and risqué, the two figures playing an illicit sexual game as a statue of Cupid keeps their secret. The lush garden unfolds behind them into impossibility, and the world is soaked in soft erotic light. It is as close to “let them eat cake” as a painting has ever come.

ALEXANDER CALDER

A mechanical engineer who applied the mathematics of movement to art making and created a revolution of sculpture. Alexander Calder stands alone in the history of 20th century art, with his dynamic mobiles and wire sculptures finding a remarkable balance between play and theory, at once rigorous in their creation and ideation and open to the whims of his wild experimentation. Calder’s obsession was the circus, and the movement of acrobats, performers, dancers, and animals who populated the big top. In everything he did, whether directly or indirectly, the kinetic, joyous exuberance of the circus is present, and his artworks capture the fantastical feeling of a day spent watching the show. This playfulness is clear here, in Calder’s Standing Man - a quick sketch on paper that nonetheless shows his mastery of balance in two dimensions as well as three. A naive figure emerges from abstract shapes that feel at once primal and reminiscent of a delicately made musical instrument, and in few brushstrokes Calder creates a work of happy harmony.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

The last painting in her much revered series, O’Keeffe takes the flower to its abstract conclusion. She turns the stigma into a surreal form, the hues of the petals become a expansive background to a winding road. She reduces nature into something formal and emotional, and requires the viewer to read it as they like. “I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown.” Said O’Keeffe, “So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.” When she began her Jack-in-the-Pulpit series, which sees the flowers move across four canvases from reality to abstraction, Georgia O’Keeffe was all but unknown. A female modernist painter in a male dominated world, attempting to carve a name for herself. By the time the series was completed, she had gained reputation and with it, speculation. Every viewer tried to create their own narrative of the artist from her paintings of flowers, casting her as an artist of repression, of longing, of lust, of feminism, of tradition. But O’Keeffe has long defied any easy narrative, she is an artist of America and as broad and complicated as the country she captured, through its abstraction and its reality.