GEORGE GROSZ

Grosz rejected the expressionist spirit that was overtaking European art in the early decades of the 20^th Century. He saw their style as self-involved, uncommitted to reality in its yearning for romantic ideals which could never be and resented the personality cults that the artists of the movements cultivated, willingly or not, around them. ‘The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business.”, he said, “The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.” Instead, Grosz was at the forefront of a style known as New Objectivism, which was about practical and honest engagement with the world, rid of pretentions or fancy instead the artists would try and represent the world as it appeared and find the art in the truthful imperfections around them. His portraiture came to define this style, austere and honest, he depicts people as they were, creating historical records that aspire to little more than the beauty of the everyday.

STUART DAVIS

On the precipice of modernity, the long shadow of the Second World War starting to wane and the art forms that had sprung up in its wake becoming tired and clichéd, Stuart Davis built a bridge. The geometric abstractions, colour-field paintings, modernist simplifications and abstract expressionists that had dominated the aesthetic language for preceding decade meet with the burgeoning pop-art style, neither named nor acknowledged at scale at the time this work was made. Consumer products and bold slogans of capitalism and commerce combine with jazz-inspired formalism, to create a work that refuses to fit neatly into any genre. Davis was a visionary, and ahead of his time at every stage of his career. He was acutely aware of the political purpose of his art, and used his medium to push the discourse and the vision of a better future, and comment on the idiosyncrasies and flaws of the present he was living in.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

“People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’n not easy to paint oneself either”, so said Van Gogh in one of his many letters to his brother Theo. Yet for all the difficulty, or perhaps because of it, Van Gogh did paint himself, constantly and almost obsessively in his short-lived artistic life. Often from the same angle, with his face at three quarters to the view, Van Gogh documented his changing life, mind, and health with each new self-portrait and from the clues that are hidden within them we can learn enormous amounts about his life. This painting was perhaps his first since he moved to Paris, seeking out the new style of French painting he had heard of. He documents himself as a fashionable Parisian, bourgeois with an elegant suit and well fitted straw hat, in rhythmic, hypnotic brushstrokes. Yet Van Gogh never quite felt comfortable as the figure he tried to depict here, this portrait was a version of himself and you can see, in his eyes, that it does not match his true spirit.