MAN RAY

For an exhibition in 1917, Man Ray made a series of ten collages that he framed and installed  on a rotating pole, moveable by the audience, and called ‘Revolving Doors’. The works are geometric abstractions, bright and playful in nature they combine machine like, rigid forms with a loose human touch that brings a musicality to their composition. The works were not well received on their debut, too colourful for those collectors used to the muted palettes of Cubism and lyrical, serious abstraction. The original collages and their revolving stand were destroyed but years later, Ray reproduced the works as a series of prints, such as the one here. Viewed together, they tell a cohesive story of movement and a hopeful modernity but alone, we are able to focus on the formal components. The work is proto-color theory, a study in shades and their interactions, but it also touches on the same themes that Ray returned to throughout his career, a visual depiction of music. The sensual shape of instruments are reduced into geometric purity and the work can almost be heard through the interplay of shape and color.

REMBRANDT

Approaching death, the greatest painter of his age leaves us with a final word of hope for forgiveness and salvation. A son, wretched and wasteful has spent the fortune his father gave him on frivolity and decadence and returns home begging for a lowly position to redeem himself, but is instead welcomed in open arms and embraced not for his sins but his penitence. This is the story that Rembrandt - master painter, portraitist and hero of the Dutch golden age - depicts as amongst the final works before he passes away and it is hard not to read it as a plea for how he will be treated in the afterlife. He does not represent it with biblical accuracy, but brings in unknown characters: a women, barely visible, most likely his mother and a seated figure representing a tax collector and his own ambivalence at the wealth he has built. Rembrandt is both the young son, coming home ashamed, and the older son, dissatisfied with the lack of reward for his loyalty in contrast to his brother. Both need salvation, both hope to come home and both, as Rembrandt, long for the embrace of a loving father to forgive them for the life they have led.

EDWARD HOPPPER

Most known for his poignant vignettes of quiet moments amongst urbanity, the truest theme of Edward Hopper’s life was not the city, or the man, but America itself. He was a deeply native painter, one who did not want to discuss his art or himself but simply strove to capture the essence of the country into his canvases. His work is almost puritanical, balancing a deep melancholy with a realists eye that searches for truth in the external world, not within. His paintings reveal little of his person, so refined and considered are they, that it is in his study and sketches, such as this, that we can find the man in the brushstrokes. Mostly likely painted as a very young man, still in his twenties, there is a naivety to the drawings that hide a sophisticated composition. In few strokes, he captures a story; a man glancing back as he prepares for the road ahead, a glimmer of trepidation in his face and an unwillingness to reveal himself to the viewer. Yet, for all this, the colouring is playful, the strokes loose and undefined that bring a joy to the scene. This, perhaps, was Hopper’s genius - an ability to marry to mysterious, the melancholy, and the happy in one single vignette that spoke to a country through a single subject.