The Wedding at Cana
PAOLO VERONESE
At a wedding in Galilee, Jesus performs his first attributed miracle when he turns water into wine to satiate thirsty guests. The story appears only in the Gospel of John, but has long been held not only as an important proof of Jesus’ divinity, but also as a symbol of the Christian approval of marriage and acceptance of earthly celebration. Some fifteen hundred years later, in an era of Venetian indulges rife with feast and celebration, the great Mannerist, Renaissance painter Veronese brings the story into his contemporary world. Feasts such as the one depicted here were common in society, sumptuous displays of food that not were not just about presenting wealth, sophistication, and power, but literally passing on these qualities to the guests via food. Jesus sits at the centre of the table, surrounded by more than one hundred and thirty figures on all sides, dressed in extravagant garb of the day. A story of a humble miracle becomes indicative of a celebratory society, and brings the sacred into the profane, reminding viewers that the act of sharing food and drink is more than just community but communion.
Paolo Veronese
PAOLO VERONESE, 1563. OIL ON CANVAS.
At a wedding in Galilee, Jesus performs his first attributed miracle when he turns water into wine to satiate thirsty guests. The story appears only in the Gospel of John, but has long been held not only as an important proof of Jesus’ divinity, but also as a symbol of the Christian approval of marriage and acceptance of earthly celebration. Some fifteen hundred years later, in an era of Venetian indulges rife with feast and celebration, the great Mannerist, Renaissance painter Veronese brings the story into his contemporary world. Feasts such as the one depicted here were common in society, sumptuous displays of food that not were not just about presenting wealth, sophistication, and power, but literally passing on these qualities to the guests via food. Jesus sits at the centre of the table, surrounded by more than one hundred and thirty figures on all sides, dressed in extravagant garb of the day. A story of a humble miracle becomes indicative of a celebratory society, and brings the sacred into the profane, reminding viewers that the act of sharing food and drink is more than just community but communion.
Still Life with Fish
GEORGES BRAQUE
While Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began together, creating the vocabulary of cubism that would go on to inform the entire 20th century art movement, by 1941 the two had gone their separate ways. Picasso was restless, experimenting further and defying boundaries at every turn as he became increasingly unclassifiable in his practice. Braque, on the other hand, was rigorous, disciplined, and singularly focused on mastering Cubism and continuing to burn the torch for the art movement that he developed. His later works, such as Still Life with Fish here, are some decades removed from the origins of the movement and the increased wisdom is clear. Gone are the dizzying, erratic geometries that obscured the subject into kaleidoscopic wonder and in their place is a gentle, deftly handled study of perspective. The wildness of youth and excitement of the new has been tempered by a deep understanding of his forms and style, and Still Life with Fish is a masterful example. Its radicalness creeps up on you - at first glance it looks like a recognisable scene but the more you engage, the more you see just how many perspectives Braque shows this simplicity in. While Picasso may have answered more questions in his wild career, Braque answers are perhaps more concise.
Georges Braque
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1941. OIL ON CANVAS.
While Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began together, creating the vocabulary of cubism that would go on to inform the entire 20th century art movement, by 1941 the two had gone their separate ways. Picasso was restless, experimenting further and defying boundaries at every turn as he became increasingly unclassifiable in his practice. Braque, on the other hand, was rigorous, disciplined, and singularly focused on mastering Cubism and continuing to burn the torch for the art movement that he developed. His later works, such as Still Life with Fish here, are some decades removed from the origins of the movement and the increased wisdom is clear. Gone are the dizzying, erratic geometries that obscured the subject into kaleidoscopic wonder and in their place is a gentle, deftly handled study of perspective. The wildness of youth and excitement of the new has been tempered by a deep understanding of his forms and style, and Still Life with Fish is a masterful example. Its radicalness creeps up on you - at first glance it looks like a recognisable scene but the more you engage, the more you see just how many perspectives Braque shows this simplicity in. While Picasso may have answered more questions in his wild career, Braque answers are perhaps more concise.
Summer #2
ADOLF GOTTLIEB
A floating orb glows with searing intensity. It is the summer sun that brings with it joys and dangers in equal measure, that enforces a regularity and order to life dictated by its rising and falling. Below, a violent, calligraphic, abstract form grounds us in entropy, chaos, and the fallibility of humans. “I feel that I use color in terms of an emotional quality... a vehicle for the expression of feeling.”, said Gottlieb, “Now what this feeling is, is something I probably can't define, but since I eliminated almost everything from my painting except a few colors and perhaps two or three shapes, I feel a necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the particular shapes, carry the burden of everything that I want to express, and all has to be concentrated within these few elements. Therefore, the color has to carry the burden of this effort”. And carry the burden, his colors do: soft pink hues, electric scarlet, dark blood reds, and the brown of earth speak to apocalypse as much as to connection and human flesh. Gottlieb represents summer as something that engulfs us, that we long for and fear, and mustn’t look at too long in case it damages our eyes.
Adolf Gottlieb
ADOLF GOTTLIEB, 1964. OIL ON LINEN.
A floating orb glows with searing intensity. It is the summer sun that brings with it joys and dangers in equal measure, that enforces a regularity and order to life dictated by its rising and falling. Below, a violent, calligraphic, abstract form grounds us in entropy, chaos, and the fallibility of humans. “I feel that I use color in terms of an emotional quality... a vehicle for the expression of feeling.”, said Gottlieb, “Now what this feeling is, is something I probably can't define, but since I eliminated almost everything from my painting except a few colors and perhaps two or three shapes, I feel a necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the particular shapes, carry the burden of everything that I want to express, and all has to be concentrated within these few elements. Therefore, the color has to carry the burden of this effort”. And carry the burden, his colors do: soft pink hues, electric scarlet, dark blood reds, and the brown of earth speak to apocalypse as much as to connection and human flesh. Gottlieb represents summer as something that engulfs us, that we long for and fear, and mustn’t look at too long in case it damages our eyes.
Reclining Woman
FERNAND LÉGER
Cubism, war, and industrialism - these were the three muses of Léger’s career in the early 1920s. One of the first artists to join Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s new movement of Cubism, he exhibited in all of the early shows and helped define the new art language to the public. While his contemporaries cubist forms were rigid and angular, Léger’s style came to be known as “Tubism”, so named for the tubular, pipe like mechanical structures that served as the subjects or motifs for so much of his early work. Yet experiences fighting at the front in World War I softened his allegiances to industrial forms, and by 1922 he had swapped metal for flesh, and abstracted still lives had been replaced by figurative forms, still retaining his ‘Tubist’ influences. Léger felt that art was more important than ever in the post-war period, and that the work he had been doing before the war was academic, restrictive and inaccessible to most save for the privileged, educated few. His movement toward portraiture and nudes was an attempt to show the poetry of the everyday experience, to take images and scenes familiar to the masses and elevate them into something unusual, thought-provoking and beautiful.
Fernand Léger
FERNAND LÉGER, 1922. OIL ON CANVAS.
Cubism, war, and industrialism - these were the three muses of Léger’s career in the early 1920s. One of the first artists to join Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s new movement of Cubism, he exhibited in all of the early shows and helped define the new art language to the public. While his contemporaries cubist forms were rigid and angular, Léger’s style came to be known as “Tubism”, so named for the tubular, pipe like mechanical structures that served as the subjects or motifs for so much of his early work. Yet experiences fighting at the front in World War I softened his allegiances to industrial forms, and by 1922 he had swapped metal for flesh, and abstracted still lives had been replaced by figurative forms, still retaining his ‘Tubist’ influences. Léger felt that art was more important than ever in the post-war period, and that the work he had been doing before the war was academic, restrictive and inaccessible to most save for the privileged, educated few. His movement toward portraiture and nudes was an attempt to show the poetry of the everyday experience, to take images and scenes familiar to the masses and elevate them into something unusual, thought-provoking and beautiful.
Antibes Seen from La Salis
CLAUDE MONET
Even the great master of Impressionism himself, who had taught the world how to capture nature, light, color, and form in all of its beauty and translate the splendour of the environment into oil and canvas, felt humbled by the view ahead of him. Spending the summer in France’s southern coast in the old town of Antibes, Claude Monet would walk the landscapes along the Azure Coast with his easel and canvas, setting up to paint en plein air, wherever the beauty struck him. Yet, unusually, he laboured over the works here. The sun, the trees, the sea, all were, as he wrote in letters to friends and contemporaries, almost too beautiful to bear - ‘In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones’, he wrote to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He saw Antibes as a fairy-tale town, one that existed as much in the imagination as it did in reality, and so his usually deftness of capturing the impression, the feeling of a moment was further out of reach. Yet his work here is some of the most delicate and beautiful of his career, the dazzling sweetness of the landscape is abundant and intoxicating.
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1888. OIL ON CANVAS.
Even the great master of Impressionism himself, who had taught the world how to capture nature, light, color, and form in all of its beauty and translate the splendour of the environment into oil and canvas, felt humbled by the view ahead of him. Spending the summer in France’s southern coast in the old town of Antibes, Claude Monet would walk the landscapes along the Azure Coast with his easel and canvas, setting up to paint en plein air, wherever the beauty struck him. Yet, unusually, he laboured over the works here. The sun, the trees, the sea, all were, as he wrote in letters to friends and contemporaries, almost too beautiful to bear - ‘In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones’, he wrote to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He saw Antibes as a fairy-tale town, one that existed as much in the imagination as it did in reality, and so his usually deftness of capturing the impression, the feeling of a moment was further out of reach. Yet his work here is some of the most delicate and beautiful of his career, the dazzling sweetness of the landscape is abundant and intoxicating.
Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels
BLAKE
William Blake was steeped in the Bible. A deeply spiritual man who rejected organised religion, he found endless inspiration in the Testaments contained within and understood them as works to be interpreted -“Both read the Bible day and night”, he wrote, “But thou readst black where I read white”. It was not, for him, a prescriptive book but an inspiring one, the stories told were not historical fact or laws for life, but ways to understand oneself and the world around them. In every medium Blake worked in, from poetry and scholarship to watercolour and sculpture, the Bible played a part in his process and creation. The work here was commissioned as part of an enormous series depicting 80 subjects from the Bible. ‘The Whole Bible is filld with Imaginations & Visions from End to End”, he said, “And not with Moral virtues that is the baseness of Plato & the Greeks & all Warriors. The Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Domineering over others”.
William Blake
WILLIAM BLAKE, 1805. WATERCOLOR ON PAPER.
William Blake was steeped in the Bible. A deeply spiritual man who rejected organised religion, he found endless inspiration in the Testaments contained within and understood them as works to be interpreted -“Both read the Bible day and night”, he wrote, “But thou readst black where I read white”. It was not, for him, a prescriptive book but an inspiring one, the stories told were not historical fact or laws for life, but ways to understand oneself and the world around them. In every medium Blake worked in, from poetry and scholarship to watercolour and sculpture, the Bible played a part in his process and creation. The work here was commissioned as part of an enormous series depicting 80 subjects from the Bible. ‘The Whole Bible is filld with Imaginations & Visions from End to End”, he said, “And not with Moral virtues that is the baseness of Plato & the Greeks & all Warriors. The Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Domineering over others”.
Excavation
WILLEM DE KOONING
De Kooning spent months finding the heart of an artwork. Meticulously building up thick layers of paint and then meticulously scraping them away, he worked as an excavator of beauty and truth. The title of this artwork, then, is fitting, and when it was completed it was his largest canvas to date. Inspired by an image of a woman working in a rice field from a Neo-realist Italian film, the organic forms and calligraphic lines seem to dance and flutter across the space, they’re movements revealing a hidden world of colour that lurks below. On initial viewing, the work seems wholly abstract, but as you get closer and begin to learn that language of his brushstrokes what was once a field of white becomes an orchestra of faces, objects, animals and bones. Eyes suddenly emerge out of vastness and fish swim through a squirming swathe of bodies - de Kooning forces the viewer to take on the same role as himself, and we become excavators of his vision the longer we look.
Willem de Kooning
WILLEM DE KOONING, 1950. OIL ON CANVAS.
De Kooning spent months finding the heart of an artwork. Meticulously building up thick layers of paint and then meticulously scraping them away, he worked as an excavator of beauty and truth. The title of this artwork, then, is fitting, and when it was completed it was his largest canvas to date. Inspired by an image of a woman working in a rice field from a Neo-realist Italian film, the organic forms and calligraphic lines seem to dance and flutter across the space, they’re movements revealing a hidden world of colour that lurks below. On initial viewing, the work seems wholly abstract, but as you get closer and begin to learn that language of his brushstrokes what was once a field of white becomes an orchestra of faces, objects, animals and bones. Eyes suddenly emerge out of vastness and fish swim through a squirming swathe of bodies - de Kooning forces the viewer to take on the same role as himself, and we become excavators of his vision the longer we look.
Portrait of Ephraim Bueno
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
For most artists of the 17th century, the oil painting was the final form of any image. Preparatory sketches, drawings, and small paintings were all standard elements of the process, used to refining the composition and formal elements of a picture before taking oil to panel or canvas. This piece, then, is unusual in the canon of art history - an oil painting with a primary purpose of preparation for an etching, a medium at the time that was just over a century old. Rembrandt’s focus here was on the facial features of his subject and the interplay of light and dark. We can see in his rendering of Ephraim Beuno’s hands and garments, composed with loose, thick brushstrokes, that this work was not intended as a finished piece fit for display. Instead, in the delicate rendering of his facial features and the subtle changes in light, we get an insight into the artist at work, working through specific details ahead of a finer, more exacting work in a different medium. Yet, despite it’s function, the work still contains some of Rembrandt’s magic, capturing emotion, dignity, and humanity in oil.
Rembrandt Van Rijn
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, c.1647. OIL ON PANEL.
For most artists of the 17th century, the oil painting was the final form of any image. Preparatory sketches, drawings, and small paintings were all standard elements of the process, used to refining the composition and formal elements of a picture before taking oil to panel or canvas. This piece, then, is unusual in the canon of art history - an oil painting with a primary purpose of preparation for an etching, a medium at the time that was just over a century old. Rembrandt’s focus here was on the facial features of his subject and the interplay of light and dark. We can see in his rendering of Ephraim Beuno’s hands and garments, composed with loose, thick brushstrokes, that this work was not intended as a finished piece fit for display. Instead, in the delicate rendering of his facial features and the subtle changes in light, we get an insight into the artist at work, working through specific details ahead of a finer, more exacting work in a different medium. Yet, despite it’s function, the work still contains some of Rembrandt’s magic, capturing emotion, dignity, and humanity in oil.
Madame Monet Embroidering
CLAUDE MONET
For a brief moment, the beauty of domesticity was greater than that of nature. Monet mostly painted outside, bringing his canvas out for long days in the fresh air, working en plein air to capture waterlilies, sunsets, rivers, and fields. The great father of modernism, and the creator of the painting for which Impressionism took its name, wanted to capture the world not as it necessarily was, but as he saw it. Here, however, he brought his easel and brushes inside, and painted this delicate, beautiful work of his wife quietly absorbed in her embroidery loom. Light remains a focus, it ebbs through the large windows and dances off her dress and her face. There is such tenderness in every brush stroke, the whole painting seems to exude a powerful, understated romance. It is not wild with passion or energy, nor is it attempting at objectivity. Instead it is a quiet ode to love and marriage, and to the beauty of co-habitation as Monet saw it.
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1875. OIL ON CANVAS.
For a brief moment, the beauty of domesticity was greater than that of nature. Monet mostly painted outside, bringing his canvas out for long days in the fresh air, working en plein air to capture waterlilies, sunsets, rivers, and fields. The great father of modernism, and the creator of the painting for which Impressionism took its name, wanted to capture the world not as it necessarily was, but as he saw it. Here, however, he brought his easel and brushes inside, and painted this delicate, beautiful work of his wife quietly absorbed in her embroidery loom. Light remains a focus, it ebbs through the large windows and dances off her dress and her face. There is such tenderness in every brush stroke, the whole painting seems to exude a powerful, understated romance. It is not wild with passion or energy, nor is it attempting at objectivity. Instead it is a quiet ode to love and marriage, and to the beauty of co-habitation as Monet saw it.
Paris Abstraction
ISAMU NOGUCHI
Born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet father and am American writer mother, by the age of 24 Isamu Noguchi had lived many lives across multiple continents and found himself apprenticing for the great sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris. The two could hardly communicate - Noguchi spoke almost no French and Brâncuşi little English - but for two years he learnt from this master of modernism not just how to render wood, stone, and steel, but how to appreciate the ‘value of a moment’. Noguchi would go on to become one of the most significant sculptors and furniture designers of the 20th century, combining a Japanese design aesthetic with a western modernist philosophy, but in the summer of 1927, the young man was learning how to reduce the world to it’s most elegant, pure, and beautiful forms. Brâncuşi’s mastery was in finding the platonic ideal of a given subject, discovering the fewest elements that could be combined to create a truthful likeness and it was this quality that Noguchi was learning from. His drawing here, a medium he felt he lost mastery of as he aged, shows both the influence of his teacher and omens of his career to come.
Isamu Noguchi
ISAMU NOGUCHI, c.1927. WATERCOLOUR, INK, AND GRAPHIC ON PAPER.
Born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet father and am American writer mother, by the age of 24 Isamu Noguchi had lived many lives across multiple continents and found himself apprenticing for the great sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris. The two could hardly communicate - Noguchi spoke almost no French and Brâncuşi little English - but for two years he learnt from this master of modernism not just how to render wood, stone, and steel, but how to appreciate the ‘value of a moment’. Noguchi would go on to become one of the most significant sculptors and furniture designers of the 20th century, combining a Japanese design aesthetic with a western modernist philosophy, but in the summer of 1927, the young man was learning how to reduce the world to it’s most elegant, pure, and beautiful forms. Brâncuşi’s mastery was in finding the platonic ideal of a given subject, discovering the fewest elements that could be combined to create a truthful likeness and it was this quality that Noguchi was learning from. His drawing here, a medium he felt he lost mastery of as he aged, shows both the influence of his teacher and omens of his career to come.
The Virgin in Prayer
SASSOFERRATO
In the 17th Century, the Virgin Mary in prayer had come into vogue, aided by the Roman Catholic Reformation that placed personal, solitary worship as one of its central tenets. Wealthy patrons, churches, and religious orders began to collect images of this scene and Sassoferrato, a committed follower of Raphael’s style, became widely regarded as the master of the genre. Looking at this work, one of many that he painted and sold over his life, it is easy to see why. There are no distractions from the subject and the action at hand. The Virgin Mary is framed by a black background, and depicted in three colours: red, blue, and white. He skin is rendered with such exacting delicacy that she seems to come to life, and the lighting offer such clarity as to seem almost hyperreal. For all the technical mastery and compositional genius on show, the star of the work is something far simpler - the Lapus Lazuli blue of her robes. A pigment made from rare stone sourced in contemporary Afghanistan, it brims with life and energy, drawing the eye in and framing the scene with infectious splendour.
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato
GIOVANNI BATTISTA SALVI DA SASSOFERRATO, c.1645. OIL ON CANVAS.
In the 17th Century, the Virgin Mary in prayer had come into vogue, aided by the Roman Catholic Reformation that placed personal, solitary worship as one of its central tenets. Wealthy patrons, churches, and religious orders began to collect images of this scene and Sassoferrato, a committed follower of Raphael’s style, became widely regarded as the master of the genre. Looking at this work, one of many that he painted and sold over his life, it is easy to see why. There are no distractions from the subject and the action at hand. The Virgin Mary is framed by a black background, and depicted in three colours: red, blue, and white. He skin is rendered with such exacting delicacy that she seems to come to life, and the lighting offer such clarity as to seem almost hyperreal. For all the technical mastery and compositional genius on show, the star of the work is something far simpler - the Lapus Lazuli blue of her robes. A pigment made from rare stone sourced in contemporary Afghanistan, it brims with life and energy, drawing the eye in and framing the scene with infectious splendour.
Keepsake from Corsica
DORA BOTHWELL
A deep, lifelong passion for travel defined Dora Bothwell’s life, far more than her art or relationships. A native San Franciscan, she trained as a dancer while a teenager but, following the death of her father in her early 20s, she used a small inheritance to travel to Samoa where she was adopted by a village chief and his family. There, she learn the Samoan language, dance practices, traditional ceremonies and the artistry of the local textile designers and manufactures. For the two years she spent in Samoa, she developed a visual language and art practice that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Incorporating rigorous training and European avant-garde influences, she made work that spoke to the place she was in with insight and reverence but remained recognisably hers. Her art, then, serves as a kind of scrapbook of her travels, a visual record of the way that movement changed, informed, and inspired her. This ‘Keepsake from Corsica’ immediately conjures blue seas and iridescent shells, and the dance of sunlight as it dapples across the land.
Dora Bothwell
DORA BOTHWELL, 1950. OIL ON CANVAS.
A deep, lifelong passion for travel defined Dora Bothwell’s life, far more than her art or relationships. A native San Franciscan, she trained as a dancer while a teenager but, following the death of her father in her early 20s, she used a small inheritance to travel to Samoa where she was adopted by a village chief and his family. There, she learn the Samoan language, dance practices, traditional ceremonies and the artistry of the local textile designers and manufactures. For the two years she spent in Samoa, she developed a visual language and art practice that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Incorporating rigorous training and European avant-garde influences, she made work that spoke to the place she was in with insight and reverence but remained recognisably hers. Her art, then, serves as a kind of scrapbook of her travels, a visual record of the way that movement changed, informed, and inspired her. This ‘Keepsake from Corsica’ immediately conjures blue seas and iridescent shells, and the dance of sunlight as it dapples across the land.
Arrival of the Normandy Train
CLAUDE MONET
For the last time, Monet lent his brush to the urban, man-made world. Almost every painting Monet was to make after this would be a natural landscape that sung the praises or showcased the power of nature. He had spent the last decade or more paying tribute to a new landscape of Paris, its grand boulevards, metal structures, glass exhibition spaces, and towering bridges, but now all of that modernity had lost its allure. It is fitting, then, that the subject of his swan song to the city and the industrialised world it represented would be this particular train. This was the terminal that linked Paris and Normandy, where Monet honed his en plein air landscapes, and the terminal that took the Impressionists to rural villages north and west of the city to escape and practice. The subject of Monet’s goodbye is the very means of his escape, and he paints it with such tenderness, as it to thank the train itself, or the invention of the steam engine, for what it has provided him: peace, solitude, and a way to connect with himself by connecting to the world around him.
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1877. OIL ON CANVAS.
For the last time, Monet lent his brush to the urban, man-made world. Almost every painting Monet was to make after this would be a natural landscape that sung the praises or showcased the power of nature. He had spent the last decade or more paying tribute to the new landscape of Paris, its grand boulevards, metal structures, glass exhibition spaces, and towering bridges but all of that modernity had lost its allure. It is fitting, then, that the subject of his swan song to the city and the industrialised world it represented would be this particular train. This was the terminal that linked Paris and Normandy, where Monet honed his en plein air landscapes, and the terminal that took the Impressionists to rural villages north and west of the city to escape and practice. The subject of Monet’s goodbye is the very means of his escape, and he paints it with such tenderness, as it to thank the train itself, or the invention of the steam engine, for what it has provided him: peace, solitude, and a way to connect with himself by connecting to the world around him.
Inventions of the Monsters
SALVADOR DALI
Spain was in the midst of a civil war, and Salvador Dalí was hiding out in the Semmering mountains near Vienna painting this work, unaware that the city below him was months away from the Anschluss, whereby Nazi Germany was to annexe Austria. “According to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war”, wrote Dalí about this painting, “Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster.” The canvas is ripe with omens, every inch brings with it foreboding and terror, even in the depiction of the love between the artist and his wife. The great Catalonian, despite his comfort with the subconscious world, was in touch with the frequencies of his culture and in this work he did not invent the monsters, only showed their approach towards a world increasingly willing to have them.
Salvador Dalí
SALVADOR DALÍ, 1937. OIL ON CANVAS.
Spain was in the midst of a civil war, and Salvador Dalí was hiding out in the Semmering mountains near Vienna painting this work, unaware that the city below him was months away from the Anschluss, whereby Nazi Germany was to annexe Austria. “According to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war”, wrote Dalí about this painting, “Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster.” The canvas is ripe with omens, every inch brings with it foreboding and terror, even in the depiction of the love between the artist and his wife. The great Catalonian, despite his comfort with the subconscious world, was in touch with the frequencies of his culture and in this work he did not invent the monsters, only showed their approach towards a world increasingly willing to have them.
The Fountain
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
John Singer Sargent lived a life of two halves. The first was as a wildly successful portrait artist, amongst the greatest of his generation and celebrated across American high society, who’s inhabitants he most often depicted. He had a natural confidence with the brush, so sure in his hand that he commenced works without pencil sketches and his portraits captured a loose essence with Edwardian luxury, and occasional eroticism. The second was as a landscape artist, rejecting the grandiosity and traditionalism of his portraiture for painting en plein air in a far more impressionist style. 1907, when this work was painted during his travels around Italy, was the exact year of transition between these two movements. One can see in ‘The Fountain’ his internal conflict; the work is both portrait and landscape, painted outside of his friends and frequent travelling companions. They are an epitome of turn of the century decadent luxury and yet the landscape they exist in has a relaxed, definitively impressionist air - on a single canvas we see a collision between worlds, times, and Sargent’s split lives.
John Singer Sargent
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, 1907. OIL ON CANVAS.
John Singer Sargent lived a life of two halves. The first was as a wildly successful portrait artist, amongst the greatest of his generation and celebrated across American high society, who’s inhabitants he most often depicted. He had a natural confidence with the brush, so sure in his hand that he commenced works without pencil sketches and his portraits captured a loose essence with Edwardian luxury, and occasional eroticism. The second was as a landscape artist, rejecting the grandiosity and traditionalism of his portraiture for painting en plein air in a far more impressionist style. 1907, when this work was painted during his travels around Italy, was the exact year of transition between these two movements. One can see in ‘The Fountain’ his internal conflict; the work is both portrait and landscape, painted outside of his friends and frequent travelling companions. They are an epitome of turn of the century decadent luxury and yet the landscape they exist in has a relaxed, definitively impressionist air - on a single canvas we see a collision between worlds, times, and Sargent’s split lives.
The Descent from the Cross
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
Divine light illuminates the deeply human body of Christ as it twists and contorts in meekness and sorrow. Rembrandt does not shy away from the pain and suffering of the crucifixion, rejecting an idealised image of divinity and instead embracing the unsettling rawness of a tortured death. This sort of depiction was nigh on unprecedented - finding weight and humanity in his lifeless form that had long been shown as beautiful, Rembrandt forces us to reckon with the darkness of Christianity’s foundational tale. His etching is extraordinarily delicate, the interplay of light and shadow impossibly subtle, and compositionally, the brightness guides us towards importance and illuminates Christ and his followers, while the rest remain in the shadows. The figure on the ladder is Rembrandt himself, his features lent to this follower of Christ as if to say that act of creation is akin to that of salvation - he draws a parallel between those who helped Christ of the cross and those who keep him alive through art.
Rembrandt van Rijn
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, 1633. ETCHING AND BURIN.
Divine light illuminates the deeply human body of Christ as it twists and contorts in meekness and sorrow. Rembrandt does not shy away from the pain and suffering of the crucifixion, rejecting an idealised image of divinity and instead embracing the unsettling rawness of a tortured death. This sort of depiction was nigh on unprecedented - finding weight and humanity in his lifeless form that had long been shown as beautiful, Rembrandt forces us to reckon with the darkness of Christianity’s foundational tale. His etching is extraordinarily delicate, the interplay of light and shadow impossibly subtle, and compositionally, the brightness guides us towards importance and illuminates Christ and his followers, while the rest remain in the shadows. The figure on the ladder is Rembrandt himself, his features lent to this follower of Christ as if to say that act of creation is akin to that of salvation - he draws a parallel between those who helped Christ of the cross and those who keep him alive through art.
Improvisation No. 30 ( Cannons)
VASILY KANDINSKY
Kandinsky wanted to shorten the distance between painter and musician. In his seminal treatise ‘Regarding the Spiritual in Art’, written the year before this work, he wrote that it was music, not painting, that was most readily able to capture and stir the “vibrations of the soul”. For tangible art to reach these heights, it would have to do so in the mode of abstraction. This was, for Kandinsky, the most musical, lyrical, and free form of painterly expression. For four years, he created these series of abstractions, trying to bring his subconscious to canvas with as little dilution or distraction as possible. He saw them as spontaneous expressions of his inner mind, and while the majority of the painting is truly abstract, a firing cannon, falling building, and a crowd appear. These were no less spontaneous than the abstract forms and colors, instead they represented the tangible aspects of the material world that he was grappling with in the moment of creation - here, it is clear that war was on his mind. Kandinsky’s Improvisations are just that: imperfect, free expressions that grasp towards the intangible, searing power of music.
Vasily Kandinsky
VASILY KANDINSKY, 1913. OIL ON CANVAS.
Kandinsky wanted to shorten the distance between painter and musician. In his seminal treatise ‘Regarding the Spiritual in Art’, written the year before this work, he wrote that it was music, not painting, that was most readily able to capture and stir the “vibrations of the soul”. For tangible art to reach these heights, it would have to do so in the mode of abstraction. This was, for Kandinsky, the most musical, lyrical, and free form of painterly expression. For four years, he created these series of abstractions, trying to bring his subconscious to canvas with as little dilution or distraction as possible. He saw them as spontaneous expressions of his inner mind, and while the majority of the painting is truly abstract, a firing cannon, falling building, and a crowd appear. These were no less spontaneous than the abstract forms and colors, instead they represented the tangible aspects of the material world that he was grappling with in the moment of creation - here, it is clear that war was on his mind. Kandinsky’s Improvisations are just that: imperfect, free expressions that grasp towards the intangible, searing power of music.
Melting Point of Ice
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Continents collide, antiquity butts up against modernity, and a primal spirituality comes into conflict with an industrialised capitalism. The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat has been explored perhaps as much as any post-war artist, and yet the depth of imagery, allegory, and references in his work continues to reward deep looking. Like few others, he was able to synthesise ideas from different movements, epochs, and civilisations, bringing traditional African art, as visible here in the mask-like face that dominates the top right corner, with a sensibility developed from his time as a graffiti artist, which the tightly coordinated chaos of the composition speaks to, and underpin the entire thing with a profound understanding of art history. Every inch of the canvas of ‘The Melting Point of Snow’ is used deliberately, weaving a tapestry of biblical stories, themes of childhood, and contemporary culture. Through all of it exists a theme of healing, from the Ritalin trademarks and copyrighted drug names, to the description of the Eye of Horus and it’s benefits, and the comforting stuffed toy labelled as non-toxic. The entirety of human history is fair game to Basquiat, and he manages to draw a line between disparate ideas in a single canvas that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, 1984. ACRYLIC, OILSTICK, AND SILKSCREEN ON CANVAS
Continents collide, antiquity butts up against modernity, and a primal spirituality comes into conflict with an industrialised capitalism. The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat has been explored perhaps as much as any post-war artist, and yet the depth of imagery, allegory, and references in his work continues to reward deep looking. Like few others, he was able to synthesise ideas from different movements, epochs, and civilisations, bringing traditional African art, as visible here in the mask-like face that dominates the top right corner, with a sensibility developed from his time as a graffiti artist, which the tightly coordinated chaos of the composition speaks to, and underpin the entire thing with a profound understanding of art history. Every inch of the canvas of ‘The Melting Point of Snow’ is used deliberately, weaving a tapestry of biblical stories, themes of childhood, and contemporary culture. Through all of it exists a theme of healing, from the Ritalin trademarks and copyrighted drug names, to the description of the Eye of Horus and it’s benefits, and the comforting stuffed toy labelled as non-toxic. The entirety of human history is fair game to Basquiat, and he manages to draw a line between disparate ideas in a single canvas that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Apartment Houses, Paris
JEAN DUBUFFET
In 1923, Jean Dubuffet read ‘Artistry of the Mentally Ill’ and developed a lifelong interest in work made by those with no formal training, suffering from mental illness. But Dubuffet was in no rush, he was a man of curiosity for the first half of his life; an occasional artist, winemaker and scholar, Dubuffet rejected anything that confined him as he strove for knowledge and travelled the world. He immersed himself in the study of noise music, of ancient languages, of lost wisdom and poetry, picking up and putting down the paintbrush every decade or so. But some twenty two years after reading Hans Prizhorn’s book, the eventual progenitor of the art brut (raw art) movement finally formalised those ideas of art made by the alienated and insane and began his life’s practice. He tried to emulate the work of someone expressing pure emotion, however muddled it might be, using only the tools at their disposal. Experimenting with non-traditional new materials, he incorporated mud, sand, gravel, and, notably, plant matter into his compositions. Here, the urban world of Paris reached into the very earth it was built upon, becoming a Frankenstein monster of man and nature.
Jean Dubuffet
JEAN DUBUFFET, 1946. OIL, SAND, AND CHARCOAL ON CANVAS.
In 1923, Jean Dubuffet read ‘Artistry of the Mentally Ill’ and developed a lifelong interest in work made by those with no formal training, suffering from mental illness. But Dubuffet was in no rush, he was a man of curiosity for the first half of his life; an occasional artist, winemaker and scholar, Dubuffet rejected anything that confined him as he strove for knowledge and travelled the world. He immersed himself in the study of noise music, of ancient languages, of lost wisdom and poetry, picking up and putting down the paintbrush every decade or so. But some twenty two years after reading Hans Prizhorn’s book, the eventual progenitor of the art brut (raw art) movement finally formalised those ideas of art made by the alienated and insane and began his life’s practice. He tried to emulate the work of someone expressing pure emotion, however muddled it might be, using only the tools at their disposal. Experimenting with non-traditional new materials, he incorporated mud, sand, gravel, and, notably, plant matter into his compositions. Here, the urban world of Paris reached into the very earth it was built upon, becoming a Frankenstein monster of man and nature.
Anne
LEON KROLL
In his time, Leon Kroll was most known for two things - painterly nudes and heroic landscapes. Part of a group known as ‘The Independents’ headed up by Robert Henri and counting Edward Hopper amongst their ranks, Kroll was quintessentially American in his style. His paintings are figurative, but with the loose and easy brushstrokes that lend them an air of the laissez-faire. The work is bright and pastoral, splitting with his contemporaries who favoured dark and gritty urban scenes. Instead, he renders women with a delicacy and reverence quite unusual for the time, bringing a fauvist palette to something uniquely of it’s era. In his portrait of ‘Anne’, he displays a confidence in his hand, and an ability to capture his subject in a candid moment. She looks away from the viewer, almost knowingly, aware of our gaze and unfazed by the attention. Kroll is relaxed in his style, such that it extends to our feelings towards the painting. We are at ease with Anne, happy to sit in her presence.
Leon Kroll
LEON KROLL, 1930. OIL ON LINEN.
In his time, Leon Kroll was most known for two things - painterly nudes and heroic landscapes. Part of a group known as ‘The Independents’ headed up by Robert Henri and counting Edward Hopper amongst their ranks, Kroll was quintessentially American in his style. His paintings are figurative, but with the loose and easy brushstrokes that lend them an air of the laissez-faire. The work is bright and pastoral, splitting with his contemporaries who favoured dark and gritty urban scenes. Instead, he renders women with a delicacy and reverence quite unusual for the time, bringing a fauvist palette to something uniquely of it’s era. In his portrait of ‘Anne’, he displays a confidence in his hand, and an ability to capture his subject in a candid moment. She looks away from the viewer, almost knowingly, aware of our gaze and unfazed by the attention. Kroll is relaxed in his style, such that it extends to our feelings towards the painting. We are at ease with Anne, happy to sit in her presence.