Paul Zweig

A poet, critic and memoirist, Zweig was admired by his friends and the literary circles around him, but remains in wider obscurity to this day. Zweig was an obsessive study of culture, peoples and moods. Cross pollination is clear in Zweig’s work, his techniques as a memoirist clear across his poetry. A careful and astute eye, self-possessed and self-aware, he wrote as if with a magnifying glass, looking at the offhand nature of the world and reading the truth from it. While he looked outwards, he found himself everywhere. He journeyed deeper into the self with each evocative work.

Jack Spicer

Spicer saw the poet as a radio, intercepting transmissions from outer space. Language was furniture, through which information navigated. He was a radical, both in his literary style and in his life, defying every convention at every turn. Refusing to allow his work to be copyrighted, Spicer ran a workshop called ‘Poetry as Magic’, and for him the statement was true. Poetry was a means to experience and translate the unexplainable, and had to be freely available for those who searched for truth. Spicer died penniless and with only small acclaim, like so many poets before and after him, but the ideas he laid out in his work have gone on to influence thousands of poets after him.

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka was many things, and many things to many people. The most significant black poet of his generation, Baraka also is considered the founder of the Black Arts Movement and the Second Harlem Renaissance. Baraka wanted poetry, literature and art to be a legitimate product of experience. In doing so, he could hold a mirror up to a world in desperate need of self reflection. He was as fearless in his writing as he was in his activism, and he had a clear vision. The BAM became an aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power and Baraka’s voice was the most poignant, cutting and profound.

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 20^th 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.