Red Madras Headress
HENRI MATISSE
Two connected lines, filled with a simple black circle, somehow penetrate into the depth of our soul with a look of knowing, pity, and compassion. Amelie Matisse, the artists wife and the subject of this work, was a frequent muse for her partner and it is her face that adorned so many of his ideas of revolution. Here, he renders her simply, distorting her shapes and her body so that she becomes a canvas for pattern, for geometry, and for colour. As with all expressionist paintings, the work is not so concerned with depicting reality but with evoking emotional experiences. There is a reductive simplicity in the painting, almost naïve in it’s depiction that at once elevates the work into something approaching purity. Freed from the need for photo-realism or accurate representation, Matisse embraces the bias eye with which he sees his wife. He paints her in glory and elegance, she becomes an artwork to inspire as much as a woman to love.
Henri Matisse
HENRI MATISSE, 1907. OIL ON CANVAS.
Two connected lines, filled with a simple black circle, somehow penetrate into the depth of our soul with a look of knowing, pity, and compassion. Amelie Matisse, the artists wife and the subject of this work, was a frequent muse for her partner and it is her face that adorned so many of his ideas of revolution. Here, he renders her simply, distorting her shapes and her body so that she becomes a canvas for pattern, for geometry, and for colour. As with all expressionist paintings, the work is not so concerned with depicting reality but with evoking emotional experiences. There is a reductive simplicity in the painting, almost naïve in it’s depiction that at once elevates the work into something approaching purity. Freed from the need for photo-realism or accurate representation, Matisse embraces the bias eye with which he sees his wife. He paints her in glory and elegance, she becomes an artwork to inspire as much as a woman to love.
Baptism of Christ
PAOLO VERONESE
At his workshop in Venice, Veronese and a large team of apprentice artists made variation after variation of this scene. Details change, figures are added and removed and small adjustments in the compositional structure are varied. The mood too changes across the versions. Some are bright and reverent, marking the occasion as Christ fulfilling his position and starting his journey towards the kingdom of heaven, while others and darker and more ominous, as Christ gets baptised in the River Jordan he takes on, in that moment, the sins of all men shared in the water and thus condemns himself to the fate of his crucifixion. Yet for all the changes, each of which brings a new idea and dimension to the image, there is continuity too. The dove, representing the Holy Spirit, that shines powerfully above is consistent, and the poses of John and Christ, confident and trepidatious respectfully, reappear through many versions. Veronese found remarkable depth and new layers with each retelling of this scene, and in a world before reproduction, repetition brought with it revelation.
Paolo Veronese
PAOLO VERONESE, c.1580. OIL ON CANVAS.
At his workshop in Venice, Veronese and a large team of apprentice artists made variation after variation of this scene. Details change, figures are added and removed and small adjustments in the compositional structure are varied. The mood too changes across the versions. Some are bright and reverent, marking the occasion as Christ fulfilling his position and starting his journey towards the kingdom of heaven, while others and darker and more ominous, as Christ gets baptised in the River Jordan he takes on, in that moment, the sins of all men shared in the water and thus condemns himself to the fate of his crucifixion. Yet for all the changes, each of which brings a new idea and dimension to the image, there is continuity too. The dove, representing the Holy Spirit, that shines powerfully above is consistent, and the poses of John and Christ, confident and trepidatious respectfully, reappear through many versions. Veronese found remarkable depth and new layers with each retelling of this scene, and in a world before reproduction, repetition brought with it revelation.
Girl with a Goat
PABLO PICASSO
Emerging out of years of melancholy, in which sadness so imbued every aspect of his life that his paintings existed in shades of sombre blue, Picasso’s so-called ‘Blue Period’ finally waned into what became known as his ‘Rose Period. Here, the paintings were characterised by roses and pinks, with subject matters of joy and playfulness and a pervading sense of optimism that shone through the canvas. When this work was painted, Picasso was, for the first time, financially well-off and he felt settled in his life, with a new relationship and a residence in Spain. It was perhaps his stability in his present, that made him begin to look so explicitly backwards. The titular girl of this work is posed as the ancient goddess Venus, arranging her hair, while the boy holding the water jug is directly in reference to classical Greek statues. There is the African influences that defines so much of his work in the woman’s face, but much of the painting’s power comes in how familiar it is, as if the scene exists in the western psyche, portrayed in various guises across thousands of years.
Pablo Picasso
PABLO PICASSO, 1906. OIL ON CANVAS.
Emerging out of years of melancholy, in which sadness so imbued every aspect of his life that his paintings existed in shades of sombre blue, Picasso’s so-called ‘Blue Period’ finally waned into what became known as his ‘Rose Period. Here, the paintings were characterised by roses and pinks, with subject matters of joy and playfulness and a pervading sense of optimism that shone through the canvas. When this work was painted, Picasso was, for the first time, financially well-off and he felt settled in his life, with a new relationship and a residence in Spain. It was perhaps his stability in his present, that made him begin to look so explicitly backwards. The titular girl of this work is posed as the ancient goddess Venus, arranging her hair, while the boy holding the water jug is directly in reference to classical Greek statues. There is the African influences that defines so much of his work in the woman’s face, but much of the painting’s power comes in how familiar it is, as if the scene exists in the western psyche, portrayed in various guises across thousands of years.
Untitled
GEORGES MATTHIEU
One must create fast. This was a tenet that Georges Matthieu stood by, believing in the primacy of speed to avoid any interference from the conscious mind. He worked with the goal to remove the context of existence, the knowledge gained and ideas informed by a life lived within a system from artworks. Nothing in the process of creation should be premeditated, no shapes should be painted that can be conceived of in memory nor should any visuals within the work have pre-existing references and ultimately, the artist must find a way to create in total, ecstatic isolation. If one could follow these principles, they could participate in the movement that Matthieu created known as lyrical abstraction and, in doing so, participate in the final transition away from a style of art that has been fermenting since the ancient times. Every movement, Matthieu believed, was simply an extension or interpolation of that ancient art of our ancestors, and it was only by breaking free from this context that we as a society could begin to think anew.
Georges Matthieu
GEORGES MATTHIEU, 1954. OIL ON CANVAS.
One must create fast. This was a tenet that Georges Matthieu stood by, believing in the primacy of speed to avoid any interference from the conscious mind. He worked with the goal to remove the context of existence, the knowledge gained and ideas informed by a life lived within a system from artworks. Nothing in the process of creation should be premeditated, no shapes should be painted that can be conceived of in memory nor should any visuals within the work have pre-existing references and ultimately, the artist must find a way to create in total, ecstatic isolation. If one could follow these principles, they could participate in the movement that Matthieu created known as lyrical abstraction and, in doing so, participate in the final transition away from a style of art that has been fermenting since the ancient times. Every movement, Matthieu believed, was simply an extension or interpolation of that ancient art of our ancestors, and it was only by breaking free from this context that we as a society could begin to think anew.
The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought
HENRI ROUSSEAU
Ten years on from the death of his first wife, Henri Rousseau married again. He painted this double portrait in the same year, in the style he had developed known as ‘portrait-landscapes’, to commemorate the occasion of this second union to Josephine Noury. She too had been widowed, and they both came into the relationship with the baggage of lost love. Above their heads, floating over as ghostly custodians, are the portraits of their past spouses painted in loving homage and gentle respect. Rousseau was considered a naïve painter, not trained in image making and, when he began, ignorant of the styles of the day or the masters who came before him. Yet this naivety proved to be a gift; unshackled from convention he painted freely and truthfully, developing a style distinctly of his own. Compositionally, so much of art reappropriates the established styles that have come before, yet Rousseau knew little of these and so the physical arrangement of his figures and landscapes exist in a world entirely of their own, perhaps never clearer than in this masterful work.
Henri Rousseau
HENRI ROUSSEAU, 1899. OIL ON CANVAS.
Ten years on from the death of his first wife, Henri Rousseau married again. He painted this double portrait in the same year, in the style he had developed known as ‘portrait-landscapes’, to commemorate the occasion of this second union to Josephine Noury. She too had been widowed, and they both came into the relationship with the baggage of lost love. Above their heads, floating over as ghostly custodians, are the portraits of their past spouses painted in loving homage and gentle respect. Rousseau was considered a naïve painter, not trained in image making and, when he began, ignorant of the styles of the day or the masters who came before him. Yet this naivety proved to be a gift; unshackled from convention he painted freely and truthfully, developing a style distinctly of his own. Compositionally, so much of art reappropriates the established styles that have come before, yet Rousseau knew little of these and so the physical arrangement of his figures and landscapes exist in a world entirely of their own, perhaps never clearer than in this masterful work.
Venus Verticordia
NIKOLAUS PFAFF
In early 1600s Europe, while Rudolph II ruled Austria, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Emperor, the height of sophistication was the Kunstkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities. These were decadent cabinets intended to be filled with objects, art works, artefacts and tokens that showed the wealth, culture and worldliness, and it was these cabinets that defined the aesthetic philosophies of the day. Nikolaus Pfaff was a court artist of Rudolph, and one of the most renowned sculptors of his day, working primarily in organic material and finding his speciality in the carving of ivory. This type of work was seen as a collaboration with the divine, where the artist elevated the beauty of life’s building blocks into artistic perfection that highlighted the genius of both creators. Pfaff’s work was mystic and spiritual, combining ideas of antiquities with mythical and folkloric detailing to create pieces of profound wonder.
Nikolaus Pfaff
NIKOLAUS PFAFF, c.1609. CARVED IVORY ON EBONY PEDESTAL
In the face of meaningless war, wanton destruction and the spectacle of collective genocide that seems sanctioned by society, a group of artists across Europe felt that they were left with no option but to reject the very foundation their modern world was built on. It was logic and reason, capitalism and society that had got the world to where it was in 1916, and so these same tools were useless to get it out. Enter Dada, a loose movement built on the embrace of nothingness and the absence of meaning, its very name a manifesto for the chaotic, irrational and absurd. Dada was designed to offend, not in content but in sensibility, flying boldly in the face of conceptions of aesthetics and art, ideas that the artists saw little use for. Arp was one of the founders of this movement, though sects sprang up across the continent, and he worked across mediums, applying the dada anti-philosophy to poetry, sculpture, art and collage. His work still puzzles and entices, for we still need an embrace of chaos when logic seems to fail us.
Glass and Checkerboard
JUAN GRIS
At the age of 19, Juan Gris gave up everything. He sold his possessions and moved to Paris, ingratiating himself with Apollinaire, Matisse, Braque and, a little later, Picasso. He worked as a satirical cartoonist, painting rarely but learning throughout from those who surrounded him, falling deep into the cubist world they were creating. It was not until 1911, however, after seeing Metzinger’s work ‘Tea Time’, that he found a painting practice that spoke to him. Metzinger, for Gris, had unified mathematics and art on canvas, his cubist portrait less free flowing than Braque or Picasso but rigid in its grid structure. Gris seized upon this and developed his own style that he named Analytical Cubism. The subject’s deconstruction is more rigorous and scientific, as if each element has been carefully taken apart and rearranged. His paintings alight something primal, our desire for order and straight lines, yet also express a freeness and spiritual understanding of the world. Gris was amongst the most distinctive of the cubists for this marriage between the rational and the impossible.
Juan Gris
JUAN GRIS, c.1917. OIL ON WOOD.
At the age of 19, Juan Gris gave up everything. He sold his possessions and moved to Paris, ingratiating himself with Apollinaire, Matisse, Braque and, a little later, Picasso. He worked as a satirical cartoonist, painting rarely but learning throughout from those who surrounded him, falling deep into the cubist world they were creating. It was not until 1911, however, after seeing Metzinger’s work ‘Tea Time’, that he found a painting practice that spoke to him. Metzinger, for Gris, had unified mathematics and art on canvas, his cubist portrait less free flowing than Braque or Picasso but rigid in its grid structure. Gris seized upon this and developed his own style that he named Analytical Cubism. The subject’s deconstruction is more rigorous and scientific, as if each element has been carefully taken apart and rearranged. His paintings alight something primal, our desire for order and straight lines, yet also express a freeness and spiritual understanding of the world. Gris was amongst the most distinctive of the cubists for this marriage between the rational and the impossible.
Christ at the Sea of Galilee
TINTORETTO
Mannerism emerged in direct opposition to the natural perfection of the High Renaissance. Where da Vinci, Rafael and Michelangelo were depicting the harmonious beauty of the world with astute realism, the Mannerists were exaggerating the features they deemed most beautiful to create artificial scenes. Their figures are elongated and irregularly proportioned to produce unnatural elegance. The balance and symmetry of the renaissance gave way to compositional tension and asymmetry, creating dynamic and vivid scenes. Alongside El Greco, Tintoretto stands tall amongst the Mannerists; known as ‘il Furioso’ in his native Italy, he drew with abandon and speed, his brushwork bolder than any that had come before. While he mostly depicted scenes of Venice, his religious works are some of the masterpieces of the movement. Here, Jesus is rendered in few strokes, his body long and weightless as he looks out to the sea at his disciples in a boat below an ominous sky. The colours guide us from the dark sky to the luminescent Christ and the loose, unnatural landscape creates a powerful sense of drama.
Jacopo Tintoretto
JACOPO TINTORETTO, c.1570s. OIL ON CANVAS.
Mannerism emerged in direct opposition to the natural perfection of the High Renaissance. Where da Vinci, Rafael and Michelangelo were depicting the harmonious beauty of the world with astute realism, the Mannerists were exaggerating the features they deemed most beautiful to create artificial scenes. Their figures are elongated and irregularly proportioned to produce unnatural elegance. The balance and symmetry of the renaissance gave way to compositional tension and asymmetry, creating dynamic and vivid scenes. Alongside El Greco, Tintoretto stands tall amongst the Mannerists; known as ‘il Furioso’ in his native Italy, he drew with abandon and speed, his brushwork bolder than any that had come before. While he mostly depicted scenes of Venice, his religious works are some of the masterpieces of the movement. Here, Jesus is rendered in few strokes, his body long and weightless as he looks out to the sea at his disciples in a boat below an ominous sky. The colours guide us from the dark sky to the luminescent Christ and the loose, unnatural landscape creates a powerful sense of drama.
Survival
JENNY HOLZER
“We don’t need work on joy”, said Jenny Holzer. Instead, her work digs deep into the flaws of society, into the darkness of humanity and her own psyche and screams it from the rooftops, quite literally. She has used almost every medium available except, for most of her career, a paintbrush and canvas. Instead, she utilises a text based art and presents it on everything from billboards, stone plaques, posters and benches to t-shirts, race cars and postcards. Since 1980 she has been disseminating her text-based work into public spaces and public consciousness. In short phrases, she considers domestic violence, government censorship, the war on terror, gender theory, and personal intimacy. Her work is urgent, immediate, and straightforward yet, presented within public settings, it takes on an abstraction. Holzer disseminates words of confident poetry that interrupt your day and require contemplation.
Jenny Holzer
JENNY HOLZER, 1985. ELECTRONIC BILLBOARD.
“We don’t need work on joy”, said Jenny Holzer. Instead, her work digs deep into the flaws of society, into the darkness of humanity and her own psyche and screams it from the rooftops, quite literally. She has used almost every medium available except, for most of her career, a paintbrush and canvas. Instead, she utilises a text based art and presents it on everything from billboards, stone plaques, posters and benches to t-shirts, race cars and postcards. Since 1980 she has been disseminating her text-based work into public spaces and public consciousness. In short phrases, she considers domestic violence, government censorship, the war on terror, gender theory, and personal intimacy. Her work is urgent, immediate, and straightforward yet, presented within public settings, it takes on an abstraction. Holzer disseminates words of confident poetry that interrupt your day and require contemplation.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
Having allowed chance and chaos to be collaborators for most of her career, pioneering color-field painting through the soak-stain technique, Frankenthaler began to wrest back some control. Shortly before painting this work, she had spent time in England working on a series of welded sculptures and contemplating large public commissions of her work. These two ideas were front of her mind when painting ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ as the large swathes of colour so synonymous with her paintings find themselves, for almost the first time, with hard edges. She used wood and tape to block the flow of paint from differing areas of the canvas, restricting the freedom that the paint had once enjoyed, and relegating its status from collator to assistant. Having long embraced a lack of control, here Frankenthaler guides the outcome more, suggesting a maturity in her relationship to her process. ‘You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it”, she said, ‘So that the whole surface looks felt and born at once”.
Helen Frankenthaler
HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1973. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS.
Having allowed chance and chaos to be collaborators for most of her career, pioneering color-field painting through the soak-stain technique, Frankenthaler began to wrest back some control. Shortly before painting this work, she had spent time in England working on a series of welded sculptures and contemplating large public commissions of her work. These two ideas were front of her mind when painting ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ as the large swathes of colour so synonymous with her paintings find themselves, for almost the first time, with hard edges. She used wood and tape to block the flow of paint from differing areas of the canvas, restricting the freedom that the paint had once enjoyed, and relegating its status from collator to assistant. Having long embraced a lack of control, here Frankenthaler guides the outcome more, suggesting a maturity in her relationship to her process. ‘You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it”, she said, ‘So that the whole surface looks felt and born at once”.
Solitude
THOMAS HARRISON ALEXANDER
Trained as an engineer, Harrison approached nature as a scientist, searching endlessly for something new, something unseen, that revealed truth and beauty. Spending summers at a ramshackle cottage on the Brittany coast, he would race to the dunes each evening and watch the sun set over the water, observing the colours change successively with new variations and gradients appearing each night. It was not that Harrison was a lover of nature, rather he was a lover of art and admired nature only in service of art itself. He saw the scale of the earth, and the beauty in that scale, and spent his life trying to capture it in all of its poetic light and colour. Solitude is somewhat unusual in Harrison’s oeuvre, though large in scale like the others, it appears not to be of the sea in its dramatic splendour but of a lake in its quiet tranquillity. A figure stands, nude, at the end of a still rowboat while the oar balances delicately on the surface, not breaking the water tension, and catches the brightness of the moonlight. The work is both peaceful and ominous, one sentence in a lifelong love letter to the water.
Thomas Alexander Harrison
THOMAS ALEXANDER HARRISON, 1893. OIL ON CANVAS.
Trained as an engineer, Harrison approached nature as a scientist, searching endlessly for something new, something unseen, that revealed truth and beauty. Spending summers at a ramshackle cottage on the Brittany coast, he would race to the dunes each evening and watch the sun set over the water, observing the colours change successively with new variations and gradients appearing each night. It was not that Harrison was a lover of nature, rather he was a lover of art and admired nature only in service of art itself. He saw the scale of the earth, and the beauty in that scale, and spent his life trying to capture it in all of its poetic light and colour. Solitude is somewhat unusual in Harrison’s oeuvre, though large in scale like the others, it appears not to be of the sea in its dramatic splendour but of a lake in its quiet tranquillity. A figure stands, nude, at the end of a still rowboat while the oar balances delicately on the surface, not breaking the water tension, and catches the brightness of the moonlight. The work is both peaceful and ominous, one sentence in a lifelong love letter to the water.
The Resurrection
BOTTICINI
Botticini, for all of his genius, is historically illusive. We have very few works confirmed to be by his hand, but many more which have since been attributed to him with some certainty, though without the necessary records to be definitive. His handiwork exists as invisible threads pulled by art historians, finding fingerprints of a master, and contemporary of Da Vinci, in works long mis-authored. Born in Florence as the impact of the Renaissance was growing, his father made and painted playing cards and trained the young Francisco in his early life, before he joined Leonardo Da Vince as an apprentice in the workshop of Del Verrocchio. Botticini’s work was unusual, graphic and compositional strange, perhaps inspired by the playing cards he grew up painting. The work, despite obvious technical signs of age, feels extraordinarily contemporary, the manipulation of planes and positioning of Jesus is almost surrealist. It is a celebratory, affecting and uncanny work of reverence and experimentation.
Francesco Botticini
FRANCESCO BOTTICINI, c.1467. TEMPERA ON POPLAR.
Botticini, for all of his genius, is historically illusive. We have very few works confirmed to be by his hand, but many more which have since been attributed to him with some certainty, though without the necessary records to be definitive. His handiwork exists as invisible threads pulled by art historians, finding fingerprints of a master, and contemporary of Da Vinci, in works long mis-authored. Born in Florence as the impact of the Renaissance was growing, his father made and painted playing cards and trained the young Francisco in his early life, before he joined Leonardo Da Vince as an apprentice in the workshop of Del Verrocchio. Botticini’s work was unusual, graphic and compositional strange, perhaps inspired by the playing cards he grew up painting. The work, despite obvious technical signs of age, feels extraordinarily contemporary, the manipulation of planes and positioning of Jesus is almost surrealist. It is a celebratory, affecting and uncanny work of reverence and experimentation.
Study for “Swing Landscape”
STUART DAVIS
In Jazz music, a basic chord structure is improvised on by musicians, creating new and unlikely combinations and songs from a base starting point. Stuart Davis’ paintings can be understood in the same way; he worked within a theme, painting series of similar images where he would alter the color, the geometric composition and scale but retain the base formal components. Employed by the Works Progress Administration, that gave artists jobs painting murals during the Great Depression, he was fiercely patriotic, depicting America in joyous reverie. His works are jazz ballads, loose and unstructured by rich in emotion in movement. This is a fragment of a preparatory work of his masterpiece, “Swing Landscape”. It depicts workers at a dock, abstracted and frenetic. There is an inherent optimism to Davis’ paintings of contemporary life, he renders labour and leisure in the same vivid style, uplifting the everyday occasion into musicality.
Stuart Davis
STUART DAVIS, 1938. OIL ON CANVAS.
In Jazz music, a basic chord structure is improvised on by musicians, creating new and unlikely combinations and songs from a base starting point. Stuart Davis’ paintings can be understood in the same way; he worked within a theme, painting series of similar images where he would alter the color, the geometric composition and scale but retain the base formal components. Employed by the Works Progress Administration, that gave artists jobs painting murals during the Great Depression, he was fiercely patriotic, depicting America in joyous reverie. His works are jazz ballads, loose and unstructured by rich in emotion in movement. This is a fragment of a preparatory work of his masterpiece, “Swing Landscape”. It depicts workers at a dock, abstracted and frenetic. There is an inherent optimism to Davis’ paintings of contemporary life, he renders labour and leisure in the same vivid style, uplifting the everyday occasion into musicality.
The Picture From Thibet
EMIL CARLSEN
Regarded as one of the greatest painters of his day, Carlsen struggled financially throughout his career. He worked mainly in still lives, beautifully and delicately rendered in a palette of soft hues and fine brushwork, and he held many prestigious teaching posts across America. Yet, still lives were hard to sell, having fallen out of vogue in favour of portraits, nudes and landscapes. It would take the Cubists to resurrect the medium some decades after he Carlsen reached prominence, and Carlsen found himself a master of an art-form considered dead. Despite that, he persisted, sure in the importance of the medium and his creations. “The simplest and most thorough way of acquiring all the knowledge of the craft of painting and drawing”, he said, “[is] the study of inanimate objects, still life painting, the very surest road to absolute mastery over all technical difficulties.”
Emil Carlsen
EMIL CARLSEN, c.1920. OIL ON CANVAS.
Regarded as one of the greatest painters of his day, Carlsen struggled financially throughout his career. He worked mainly in still lives, beautifully and delicately rendered in a palette of soft hues and fine brushwork, and he held many prestigious teaching posts across America. Yet, still lives were hard to sell, having fallen out of vogue in favour of portraits, nudes and landscapes. It would take the Cubists to resurrect the medium some decades after he Carlsen reached prominence, and Carlsen found himself a master of an art-form considered dead. Despite that, he persisted, sure in the importance of the medium and his creations. “The simplest and most thorough way of acquiring all the knowledge of the craft of painting and drawing”, he said, “[is] the study of inanimate objects, still life painting, the very surest road to absolute mastery over all technical difficulties.”
The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers
JAN DE BAEN
Artworks can write history in their image, defining a cultural event beyond its factual happening and representing the age through a quiet artistic bias. In the modern world, we are familiar with this idea after more than a century of photography, taken as truth, defining our understanding of the past and the present, yet we often think of paintings differently. When two brothers who had influence in Dutch parliament for many years were lynched by an angry mob in the late 1600s, it was a national story, and sketches composed by onlookers were reproduced in newspapers across the country. Jan de Baen used these sketches and accounts from attendees to construct his own version of events – trying, as was the philosophy of the Dutch Golden Age, to be as accurate as possible. Yet he still painted with his own astute eye, and the work is aesthetically beautiful not simply by accident. Decisions were made in every brushstrokes and the work was of such quality that it became enormously famous still to this day. The murder of the DeWitt Brothers is now remembered almost entirely through de Baen’s painting, and the truth of what happened on that day no longer matters – art has trumped truth to define the past.
Jan de Baen
JAN DE BAEN, c.1674. OIL ON CANVAS.
Artworks can write history in their image, defining a cultural event beyond its factual happening and representing the age through a quiet artistic bias. In the modern world, we are familiar with this idea after more than a century of photography, taken as truth, defining our understanding of the past and the present, yet we often think of paintings differently. When two brothers who had influence in Dutch parliament for many years were lynched by an angry mob in the late 1600s, it was a national story, and sketches composed by onlookers were reproduced in newspapers across the country. Jan de Baen used these sketches and accounts from attendees to construct his own version of events – trying, as was the philosophy of the Dutch Golden Age, to be as accurate as possible. Yet he still painted with his own astute eye, and the work is aesthetically beautiful not simply by accident. Decisions were made in every brushstrokes and the work was of such quality that it became enormously famous still to this day. The murder of the DeWitt Brothers is now remembered almost entirely through de Baen’s painting, and the truth of what happened on that day no longer matters – art has trumped truth to define the past.
Piano Mover’s Holiday
CHARLES DEMUTH
A new world was being built, one defined by sleek lines, mass-production, factories that churned out repetitive perfection and removed the individual from the act of the creation. The shadows of skyscrapers hung heavy over the east coast, joined by the chimney stacks of manufacturing that blew white smoke into the air as if heralding the change to a modern age. While in Europe, artists were responding to this with obstruction that took the form of Cubism’s abstraction and Futurism’s dynamism, a group of American painters led by Charles Demuth developed a style known as Precisionism. Like the European movements that influenced it, it reduced the work to its simple geometric shapes but, unlike them, it did not attempt to obscure them but to celebrate the immaculate perfection of a machine-tooled world. Demuth’s intentionally obfuscating titles nod to the absurdist that seemed present but his sharp, cohesive and proud lines spoke to a pride with his American identity and laid the groundworks for Pop Art, that took celebration of American commerce to its logical extreme.
Charles Demuth
CHARLES DEMUTH, 1919. DISTEMPER ON COMPOSITION BOARD.
A new world was being built, one defined by sleek lines, mass-production, factories that churned out repetitive perfection and removed the individual from the act of the creation. The shadows of skyscrapers hung heavy over the east coast, joined by the chimney stacks of manufacturing that blew white smoke into the air as if heralding the change to a modern age. While in Europe, artists were responding to this with obstruction that took the form of Cubism’s abstraction and Futurism’s dynamism, a group of American painters led by Charles Demuth developed a style known as Precisionism. Like the European movements that influenced it, it reduced the work to its simple geometric shapes but, unlike them, it did not attempt to obscure them but to celebrate the immaculate perfection of a machine-tooled world. Demuth’s intentionally obfuscating titles nod to the absurdist that seemed present but his sharp, cohesive and proud lines spoke to a pride with his American identity and laid the groundworks for Pop Art, that took celebration of American commerce to its logical extreme.
Woodland Pond at Sunset
GERARD BILDERS
‘It is not my aim and object’, said Bilders, ‘to paint a cow for the cow’s sake or a tree for the tree’s, but by means of the whole – to create a beautiful and huge impression which nature sometimes creates, also with the most simple means’. As a boy, Bilders visited museums in The Hague and there got lost in the 17th century Dutch Landscape paintings, falling headfirst into the framed scenes and finding refuge in the nature that he depicted. It was the all-encompassing pastoral beauty of these works that drove him to capture the landscape in its totality, and in doing so create works of abundant calm and beauty. It was not the individual elements of the natural world that enthralled him, but the unity and wholeness of the whole scene that was essential for his work. Bilders lived in the nature he created, finding his home in represented lands until he died from tuberculosis at the age of 26.
Gerard Bilders
GERARD BILDERS, c.1862. OIL ON CANVAS.
‘It is not my aim and object’, said Bilders, ‘to paint a cow for the cow’s sake or a tree for the tree’s, but by means of the whole – to create a beautiful and huge impression which nature sometimes creates, also with the most simple means’. As a boy, Bilders visited museums in The Hague and there got lost in the 17th century Dutch Landscape paintings, falling headfirst into the framed scenes and finding refuge in the nature that he depicted. It was the all-encompassing pastoral beauty of these works that drove him to capture the landscape in its totality, and in doing so create works of abundant calm and beauty. It was not the individual elements of the natural world that enthralled him, but the unity and wholeness of the whole scene that was essential for his work. Bilders lived in the nature he created, finding his home in represented lands until he died from tuberculosis at the age of 26.
St. Jerome
EL GRECO
El Greco returned five times to the image of Saint Jerome, depicting him in various states and guises. Jerome was a priest, theologian, historian and translator who produced the most important Latin translation of the bible. This representation is amongst El Greco’s later of Jerome, and shows him primarily as a scholar, in sumptuous velvet garb with vividly emphasised folds, pointing at the bible with authority. Though Greco depicted him earlier as a penitent, he retains some of the same features in this painting of him as a scholar. The long white beard and gaunt features allude to his time spent in the Syrian desert, contrasted with his clothes and elevated status here. The work is about Jerome’s duality, showing his life story in but a single frame, one that captures his importance, achievements and status while making clear the hardships he has been through.
El Greco
EL GRECO, c.1610. OIL ON CANVAS.
El Greco returned five times to the image of Saint Jerome, depicting him in various states and guises. Jerome was a priest, theologian, historian and translator who produced the most important Latin translation of the bible. This representation is amongst El Greco’s later of Jerome, and shows him primarily as a scholar, in sumptuous velvet garb with vividly emphasised folds, pointing at the bible with authority. Though Greco depicted him earlier as a penitent, he retains some of the same features in this painting of him as a scholar. The long white beard and gaunt features allude to his time spent in the Syrian desert, contrasted with his clothes and elevated status here. The work is about Jerome’s duality, showing his life story in but a single frame, one that captures his importance, achievements and status while making clear the hardships he has been through.
La Barrière
PAUL GAUGUIN
At the end of the century, a small group of artists attempted aesthetic alchemy. Known as the Synthetists, being part of the Synthetism movement, they wanted to combine the external appearance of nature, the internal feelings of the artist, and the purity of aesthetic colour and form into single works that spoke to the totality of human experience across cerebral and physical plains. Gauguin was the leader of this movement, distinctly different from the Impressionists whom he has been latterly associated with, and he understood the nature of painting in more rational, empirical way. For Gaugin, and all the Synthetists, it was essential to remember that paintings are simply flat surfaces covered in arranged color, and the goal of a painting was the remind the viewer of this, alongside more emotional responses. So Gaugin’s work is read first in response, the initial feeling that the painting provokes leads you into truthfulness, and a deep appreciation for the simple act of arranging colors.
Paul Gauguin
PAUL GAUGUIN, 1889. OIL ON CANVAS.
At the end of the century, a small group of artists attempted aesthetic alchemy. Known as the Synthetists, being part of the Synthetism movement, they wanted to combine the external appearance of nature, the internal feelings of the artist, and the purity of aesthetic colour and form into single works that spoke to the totality of human experience across cerebral and physical plains. Gauguin was the leader of this movement, distinctly different from the Impressionists whom he has been latterly associated with, and he understood the nature of painting in more rational, empirical way. For Gaugin, and all the Synthetists, it was essential to remember that paintings are simply flat surfaces covered in arranged color, and the goal of a painting was the remind the viewer of this, alongside more emotional responses. So Gaugin’s work is read first in response, the initial feeling that the painting provokes leads you into truthfulness, and a deep appreciation for the simple act of arranging colors.
Reserve Head
UNKNOWN SCULPTURE OF THE 4TH DYNASTY, REIGN OF KHUFU
The true function of these life-size sculptures is unknown. Found in the sub-tombs of non-royalty along the Nile and dating from 2551-2496B.C, nearly all known examples have the same seemingly intentional damage, consisting of damaged or removed ears and a deep carved line from the back of the cranium to the nape of the neck. Carved of smoothed but unpolished limestone, they are no idealised portraits the like would be made for private busts or death masks, but instead seem to be honest portraits of the deceased. Many theories persist but none are conclusive, and perhaps never will be. They take their name of ‘Reserve Heads’ from the early theory that these were spare vessels for the soul of the dead if something were to happen to their entombed body. Yet mystery surrounds these delicate portraits, and their otherwise simple forms are all the more enticing for the inherent unknowability of their function.
Unknown Sculptor of the 4th Dynasty, Reign of Khufu
UNKNOWN SCULPTOR OF THE 4TH DYNASTY, REIGN OF KHUFU, c.2609-2584 BC. LIMESTONE.
The true function of these life-size sculptures is unknown. Found in the sub-tombs of non-royalty along the Nile and dating from 2551-2496B.C, nearly all known examples have the same seemingly intentional damage, consisting of damaged or removed ears and a deep carved line from the back of the cranium to the nape of the neck. Carved of smoothed but unpolished limestone, they are no idealised portraits the like would be made for private busts or death masks, but instead seem to be honest portraits of the deceased. Many theories persist but none are conclusive, and perhaps never will be. They take their name of ‘Reserve Heads’ from the early theory that these were spare vessels for the soul of the dead if something were to happen to their entombed body. Yet mystery surrounds these delicate portraits, and their otherwise simple forms are all the more enticing for the inherent unknowability of their function.