WILLIAM GLACKENS

Painting at a time when the conventions of aesthetic beauty were tightly controlled by institutional forces, Glackens, along with a group of 7 artist who together were known as ‘The Eight’, defied convention to highlight their own understanding of beauty. Informed by European impressionism, they focused on realist and gritty scenes of urban life, especially in New York where most were based, to rail against the conservatism that dominated the American painterly movement at the time. Painted when the artist was 38, this self-portrait presents the artist with a knowing gaze, each brushstroke seemingly moving in a different direction to the last so that the painter’s hand is evident in every square inch of the canvas. It is, in some ways, a rallying cry against the vogue of the day, more energetic portrayals of life and a celebration of the inelegance and imperfection of existence than with the modernist techniques of the day.

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

In tumultuous waters, Christ’s disciples wrestle with their fishing boat to gain central back from the heavy storm that confronts them. They pull at the sails, adjust the rigging in anxious actions while others cower and hold on for dear life. One figure vomits overboard while another, a hidden self-portrait of the artist, looks directly at the viewer with a fearful gaze. Only Christ, bathed in unnatural light despite an otherwise accurately observed scene, remains calm, and his disciples gather around and look to him for salvation and hope. The scene is true to the Bible in most ways, depicting the titular story when the scared disciples woke Jesus in a panic as their fishing boat faced imminent danger, only for him to calm the storm with his commands and reprimand the disciples for their lack of faith. It is the earliest painting by Rembrandt, and his only seascape, despite a vogue for the motif in his contemporary Netherlands. That Rembrandt chose this story for such a significant painting is telling – he is a disciple regaining faith, aware of the battle ahead but sure that his artwork can calm any storm he faces.

FRANCIS PICABIA

Starting in 1915, Francis Picabia began to paint portraits of his circle of friends as various machines and mechanical devises. Figures of the avant-garde circle became lamps, engine parts, pulleys and cameras, rendered in clinical diagrammatic lines and playful forms. By 1920, having completed hundreds of these unorthodox portraits known as Mechanomorphs, Picabia abandoned the straight edge precision and rigorous rationality of the series. Instead, the machine parts have melted down and morphed into free-form amorphous objects that resemble single cell organisms as much as they do production line objects. Rendered in metallic silver paint and slick enamel, the means of production still speak to the factory, even if the objects they depict do not. The title too moves the portraits away from the knoweable and into the fantastic imaginary, the unique eunuch an almost impossible figure of Picabia’s creation. Replete with wit as his works were, this painting also features the hallmark of Machine Co., an invented corporation that pokes fun at the natural form of the shapes on display and the overtly human hand present in their creation.