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.
BARNETT NEWMAN
Long before he completed a painting he deemed worthy of public view, in 1933 Barnett Newman ran as a candidate for the Mayor of New York. Working a substitute teacher at the time, his campaign was based on the simple maxim that ‘only a society entirely composed of artists would be really worth living in'. It is unclear how many, if any, votes Newman got, and his political career ended with that election, but his vision for society remained with him forever. It would be nearly fifteen years before his artistic awakening with the development of his Onement series, a third way of painting that comprised of a single vertical line against a deep field of colour. Newman’s work, his new technique and idea of painting was primal, and in its primacy it was so accessible that anyone could understand it, if not create it themselves – he was creating in his work the possibility of a society filled with artists.
MARK ROTHKO
To think of Mark Rothko is to think of colour fields. Imposing canvases of thick paint, dark hues that engulf in a pure abstraction, ominous and potent in their scale, their simplicity and their size. Yet Rothko only came to these definitive works when he was well into his forties. For his early period, he created impressionist, representational works depicting urban scenes in small vignettes, as with the Quartet here. It is thrilling to see an artist working outside of their signatures, for hiding within Rothko’s painting are clues for what is to come. He tried, in this period, to paint as a child; inspired by ‘primitive art’, he saw a relationship between artistic works of early civilization and the naivety of a child’s representation of their world. Even in these early representational works, we can see a mastery of colour as a tool for emotion, the deep browns and greys are menacing and there is a sense of imposition across the work. Remove the string players and the background could be a work from 20 years later in his maturity. To see Rothko’s early work is to see an artist stripping back to purity, grappling with the same themes and emotions but distilling them down to their most powerful form.
JOSEF ALBERS
Four squares of paint, applied to cheap pressed wood, directly from the tube. Josef Alber’s homages lasted for more than 25 years from 1950 to his death in 1976, occupying his mind obsessively. Having been a professor at the Bauhaus, he moved to America and taught at both Yale and Black Mountain College, there honing his framework and establishing a new vernacular of colour and form that would go on to define the 20th century. From the narrowest conceptual frameworks can the most extraordinary perceptual complexity arise. The ‘Homage to the Square’ went on to number more than 2,000 paintings, created sequentially. Singularly fascinated with the interaction of colour, each successive variation on Albers' basic compositional scheme brought new adjustments in hue, tone and intensity. His 1963 book ‘Interaction of Colour’ referred to such experiments as ‘a study of ourselves’. What at first glance would appear to be ‘just’ four squares belies Albers' true depth - that of chromatic harmony.
PETER PAUL RUBENS
The Virgin Mary is a font of true light as she is assumed, meaning to ‘raise up’, into the heavens, accompanied by a multitude angels. At her feet, 12 apostles, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary’s two sisters are bathed in her divinity and her beauty. Ruben’s interpreted this story in his own way, seeing her ascension as analogous to the rising of the sun, as her purity and divinity is often talked about as a source of light. So Mary becomes the sun, the knot of angels that surround her bleed in and out of the clouds that they become. It is a work of reverence and praise, but from a distance it could be easily misinterpreted as a landscape. This duality was intentional not just as a compositional allegory but as an audition. This work was a presentation sketch for a larger painted version of the high altar of Antwerp Cathedral, and Rubens employed every tool in his arsenal to show his mastery and secure the job.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
For 16 years, Georgia O’Keefe left the desert and the city behind and spent her springtimes in the Adirondacks. Immersed in solitude and nature, her works softened through long walks and quiet meditation, looking out over Lake George. Pastoral, full of life and idyllic, O’Keefe fought her own rebellion to fall in love with the landscape. More known for her paintings of the desert, of yonic flowers and floating skulls, the works at Lake George are a departure of sorts. Read as an abstract work, this painting is a masterpiece of form and colour, the undulating mountains blurring into their own reflection to become a single unified motion. The soft hues that invite us into the canvas are removed the real world she was observing. In many ways, the New York countryside was too picture-postcard for O’Keefe, so her paintings reduce it to something all the more strange, peaceful and serene, with a sense of disquiet throughout. ‘There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees’, she said, ‘sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces’.
HENDRICK VAN STEENWIJK
How does a painting sound? Looking at Esther and Mordecai, the sonics are clear. Hushed tones bounce off stone walls, the whispers seem to travel through the corridor and out of the canvas. Hendrick van Steenwijk the Younger, a master of the early Flemish Baroque, activates every sense with his brushstrokes. Predominantly a painter of Architectural scenes, Van Steenwijk would include narrative vignettes within the worlds he portrayed, often snippets from biblical fables. In this way, he flattened time, depicting antiquity within his contemporary worlds and bringing faith into a recognisable modernity. His paintings are visceral; in the case of Esther and Mordecai we can feel the painting, the cold stone sends shivers, the hushed tones flutter to our ears and the musk of an ancient hallway fills our noses. Van Steenwijk was an alchemist who turned oil and wood into tangible, sensory worlds and shortened the length between centuries.
AMADEO MODIGLIANI
Modigliani is most famous for his female nudes, their elongated, distorted bodies are soft and fluid, his characteristic almond eyes make their faces almost mask like. Since Modigliani began painting, his figures have been the essence of modernity. Yet, they lived within a traditional of nude painting and portraiture, and while they subverted that tradition, they still existed within in. Here, in his portrait of his protégé Moise Kisling’s wife Renee Kisling, he epitomises modernity. She is dressed in the cutting edge vogue of the day, wearing men’s suiting and short thick hair. Modigliani traditionally curve lines give way here to sharp angles, gone are the undulations of almond shaped faces and in their place a decisive, almost aggressive bone structure quite unlike any of his other portraits, combining feminine strength and sensuality. Madame Kisling is an exception in Modigliani’s oeuvre, and his portrait of her cemented a changing of the tide as aesthetic modernity across mediums met in harmony.
RAOUL DUFY
Raoul Dufy was torn between two instincts. In 1905, he saw Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté and was immediately drawn towards Fauvism, becoming part of the circle of artists that included Matisse and Cezanne. Yet Dufy’s natural skill was as a draughtsman and he was a master of fine lines and detail, something quite counter to the ethos of Fauvism’s wild colours and impressionistic contours. His illustrator nature and fauvist ideals collided with glorious results, a tension clear in his work between two styles produced subtle and evocative paintings. The wild beast of fauvism was in some way tamed under Dufy, who’s fruitful contradiction produced work across mediums, from textile pattern and stationary design to city planning and scenic design. All of these disciplines informed his painting, where he used a technical ability and deep understanding of space to create pieces that seem at once totally real and wholly grounded in the imagination.
GEORGE MATSUSABURO HIBI
In 1942, after more than 30 years living in the United States and working as an artist in a burgeoning Californian scene, George Matsusaburo Hibi was interned in an American concentration camp under the order of FDR. Hibi was not threat to America, but he was not a naturalised citizen and so, as tensions between USA and Japan were rising, he became one of thousands of victims of Order 9066. At the age of 20, inspired by Cezanne, Hibi had given up his legal studies in Japan and moved to the American west coast where he successfully pursued an artistic career. He showed across California, organising shows at the SF Museum of Art and setting up a society of East Asian artists living on the West Coast. Hibi was dedicated to the power of art as a unifying force, and even during his time in the internment camps, he set up art schools and organised exhibitions and classes. In 1940, when the threat of war was imminent, he began to donate paintings to community venues across California. ‘There is no boundary in art.’, he said, ‘This is the only way I can show my appreciation to my many American friends here.’
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET
The Angelus took on spiritual and religious significance far beyond its painter’s intentions. It spawned a patriotic fervour when it nearly left France, inspired a madman to attack it with a knife, became an obsession of Salvador Dali, spawned an artistic revolution that informed Van Gogh, Matisse, Seurat and Cezanne and is well regarded as one of the greatest religious works of all time. All of this for a work of tranquil reverence, made from nostalgia Millet felt towards his grandmother. It depicts two labourers, upon hearing the church bell toll for the end of the day, in quiet prayer. Millet did not paint it as a religious work, yet he captured the essence of faith, of the serenity of devotion across society. It is not grand nor biblical, but honest and humble, truer to religious values that so many works of splendour. The significance of The Angelus comes from its depiction of the seemingly insignificant.
PAUL CÉZANNE
In the cold Parisian winters, Cézanne would paint in the greenhouse to keep warm. His studio was filled with assorted objects that he drew upon when needed, creating endless combinations from a small and simple repertoire in which to craft his still lives. An austere water pitcher, an old rum bottle with straw bindings, a tattered red cloth - household objects which when placed against the plants in the greenhouse become works of contemplative beauty. Cézanne’s still lives can be understood as partial portraits of himself, revealing not only in the explicit clues they give us about his residence or living situation, but in the implicit form of the objects. The way leaves on the plants fall, the plumpness of the petals, the drape of the cloth; Cézanne was rigorous and particular about what he painted and when, and there are clues as to his state of mind in each brushstroke. When this works as painted, the artist was retreating from his impressionist contemporaries, and struggling with ill-health in the winter months. There is hopefulness in the plant life depicted, but a coolness of light pervades as if with the ambiguity of a future.
CHRISTIAN SCHAD
Living with his subject, Schad was instrumental in creating a movement that he himself ultimately wanted no part of. Walter Serner, depicted here, was the founder of a seminal Dada magazine that Schad, as his roommate, was credited as co-founder and contributed most of the graphic design for. Together in Zurich the two men had front row seats to the radical group that recontextualised the very meaning of art he began to paint inspired, as if through osmosis, by Dada, Cubism, Futurism and Impressionism. The fractured, geometric forms that overtake the portrait create a sense of a broken mirror, and the fallability of all portraiture. Yet, in the following years, Schad spent increasing time in Italy and the movements that had existed around him paled in comparison to the beauty he saw in Rafael, in the delicate, incisive brushstrokes of the Renaissance that he all but abandoned the visual style of the avant-garde, creating works of traditional and breath-taking beauty that dealt with the same conceptual ideas as his contemporaries but owed their debt to a time gone by.
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.
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 20th 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.
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
Two lovers are dissolved into a pure, single, abstract form in the first sculpture of modernism. Brancusi’s choice of a kiss to make this radical, revolutionary action was no mistake. In a fell swoop he was situating himself in pantheon of art history and making all the painted and sculpture depictions of romance that came before him seem old fashioned. Throughout the rest of his life he would come back again and again to this sculpture, creating new versions that were simpler, more formalistic than the ones before. Yet here is the first, a proto-cubist rendering that reduces the most natural of acts into art that approaches geometry. Inspired by African, Assyrian and Egyptian art, ‘The Kiss’ created a new language of Western Sculpture by subverting one of its most sustained motifs.
JOAN MITCHELL
Balanced on fragile stalks, the sunflower is a pure concentration of mass and color that forces its way upwards to bloom in splendour, only to droop and wilt so visibly as to almost express the sadness of its mortality. This oddly human quality was exactly what Mitchell saw in the flowers, treating them ‘like people’ and returning to them over 40 years. The title of her works were decided after they were painted, drawing on the feelings and states she was in during their production. So, the Sunflower series are made in momnts of pride and fradility, their frenetic confident brushstrokes a mask for the delicateness of spirit. “If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it”, she explained, “and I draw it, and feel it until its death”.
EL GRECO
El Greco wasn’t telling a story. This work is not narrative, unlike so much religious art — instead, it is a moment in time, a devotional image to meditate on and consider. We see Christ in a moment of personal reflection, his gaze upwards towards God and his hands gently wrapping around the instrument of his death. We find him in the quiet; alone, a storm brewing behind him, and we join him in this contemplation. It is raw, expressive, immersive, and aching. Deeply human as we see the pain bubbling into Christs eyes yet all the while, the scene is otherworldly. Every decision El Greco made was in service of this duality, from the deep, rich colors of Christ’s dress to the fluid, organic brushstrokes that define his hands and body, Greco is not hiding his act of creation in this work. El Greco was not telling a story because he was asking us to consider a moment, to exist in a feeling and find ourselves and our meaning within it.
JOAN MIRÓ
In the 1960s, Joan Miró began stripping away anything superfluous until all he was left with was unadulterated expression. Gone were the playful flourishes of his earlier abstractions, the human-like quality of his shapes, the kinetic movement and subtle shading of his figures and planes. In their place, plumbed from the depths of his consciousness, was simplicity. The flight of the dragonfly needs nothing more than a line to speak of its movement and it is dwarfed by the enormity, and irregularity, of the sun. Miro began to paint not seeking representation or even emotion but a sort of unplaceable familiarity. If he reduced the world around him to core elements, and depicted the world as filtered through memory and experience, he could capture the purest essence of existence. The flight of the dragonfly is not about the dragonfly but about how both the smallest being and the largest concepts should take up the same space together.
HANS ARP
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.
PAUL KLEE
‘First of all,’, said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, ‘the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.’ Of course, Illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky – Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page.
WILLEM VAN DE VILDE II
In a world with immediate access to images, it’s easy to forget the utility that painting held for millennia. It was the primary medium of visual documentation, serving as not just an art form but a vehicle for posterity. In 1674, after a successful career in the Netherlands cut short by the economic collapse of the country, van de Velde and his father entered the service of Charles II with the remit to capture the glory and truth of the British Navy. His paintings are scientific and obsessive in their accuracy, every rope, rivet, sail and facet of the ship are depicted with complete faithfulness and they remain the most valuable resource that maritime historians have to understand the types of ships used in the 17th century. Yet, for all the required information they contain, van de Velde’s genius was in his ability to communicate this information within the context of drama and emotion. ‘The Gust’ is a work of urgent feeling, the precarious situation of the ship, with its collapsing sail, is mirrored in the ominous sky that seems to engulf it as it joins with the waves. Painting may have been a form of utility, but in the hands of master, it remained an art form of emotion.
HENDRICK VAN STEENWIJK
How does a painting sound? Looking at Esther and Mordecai, the sonics are clear. Hushed tones bounce off stone walls, the whispers seem to travel through the corridor and out of the canvas. Hendrick van Steenwijk the Younger, a master of the early Flemish Baroque, activates every sense with his brushstrokes. Predominantly a painter of Architectural scenes, Van Steenwijk would include narrative vignettes within the worlds he portrayed, often snippets from biblical fables. In this way, he flattened time, depicting antiquity within his contemporary worlds and bringing faith into a recognisable modernity. His paintings are visceral; in the case of Esther and Mordecai we can feel the painting, the cold stone sends shivers, the hushed tones flutter to our ears and the musk of an ancient hallway fills our noses. Van Steenwijk was an alchemist who turned oil and wood into tangible, sensory worlds and shortened the length between centuries.
ROBERT IRWIN
Painting was the not the medium that would come to define Irwin’s practice, but the same ideas, same themes, same grasps towards the unanswerable and unknowable are present here. Irwin was one of the leaders of the ‘Light and Space’ movement, alongside James Turrell, that shaped California’s post war art scene. In the late 60s, he moved away from works on canvas to create site-specific instillations and dynamic sculptures made with illuminated rods of neon and halogen bulbs. Yet we see, in this simple canvas, the architectural enquiry that existed in his practice across mediums. The square is broken up by simple, irregularly spaced lines – it is elegant and beautiful but we cannot quite understand why. “This world is not just somehow given to us whole.”, said Robert Irwin, ‘We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to ‘see’ the infinite richness in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.”
MAURICE DENIS
Avant-garde sensibility and traditional religious thought are rectified in Denis’ work, quite unlike any of his contemporaries. From his teenage years, the French artist of humble means understood his role in life was to be a Christian painter, and while he was a seminal figure in various movements of radical modernity, he never deviated from this mission. Denis built a philosophy and theory around art-making that saw its purpose as a continuation of the act of Creation, as in the Genesis stories. The essence of art, for him, was the expression of love and faith and to serve as a refuge from the darkness of the world. He did not see beauty around him in the everyday, so attempted to find it in his paintings as a way of showing his faith and trust in God’s creation. Yet while these ideas about the function of art had existed for centuries before him, it was the style in which he applied them that made Denis so unique amongst religious artists. He was a founding member of the Nabis, a key Impressionist and a godfather to Cubism, Fauvism and Abstract art. While his contemporary artists were forsaking traditional roles across their lives as they forged a new artistic language, Denis remained personally traditional, living a stable and austere life that found joy in faith and family.
JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCIA
There are no contradictions. Nothing is incompatible. These were the tenets that guided Torres-Garcia’s life, the life of a writer, painter, sculptor, teacher, theorist, muralist, novelist and architect; a renaissance man of the highest order. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain in 1891 and began a career as an artist. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found numerous schools, groups and movements including the first European Abstract art group and push the art and culture of Europe and South America to its vanguard. It was the duality of his homeland and his adopted nations that drove Torres-Garcia, and his ability to hold this duality together in a single mind. He existed between places, carrying the identity of Uruguay with him everywhere, and in doing so he was able too to carry the new and the old, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction. There are no contradictions, he said, nothing is incompatible.
LYONEL FEININGER
The human becomes landscape, as mountains emerge from the angles of her face and folds of her clothes. The chaise longue she reclines upon take on the tones of earthliness while the drapes and walls behind her become a sky, framing the subject in her duality. The subject, Julia, is Feininger’s wife and this is perhaps his most intimate study of her. A New York born artist of German heritage, as a teenager Feininger was sent to Hamburg to study where he was introduced to an burgeoning avant-garde movement that was sweeping Europe. Profoundly influenced by cubism, but not a member of the close-knit group of artists who developed it, he brought the ideas and philosophies of this new style back to America. This merged with an American optimism and a German romanticism to create a style distinctly his own, one which pays homage to the contemporary European scene and the modern styles of the day, while speaking to a spiritual love of his partner and the natural world that seem to blend into one before his eyes.
J.M.W TURNER
For the specificity of its title, Turner’s work of ‘Canale Della Guidecca’ is full of inaccuracies, half-truths and imagination. Most of the buildings pictured are non-existent, and those that are have been moved from their locations for the sake of balance and beauty. Yet John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of his time, said ‘without one single accurate detail, the picture is the likest thing to what it is meant for – the looking out of the Guidecca landwards, at sunset – of all that I have ever seen’. Turner’s genius was that he was able to capture the essence of a place or an event, and he understood that essence was more about the feeling it provoked than anything else. You can stand at the Guidecca today, look out towards sunset, feel the calm, gentle, soft majesty wash over you and know that Turner’s painting might not have been accurate, but it was truthful.