GEORGE GROSZ
Grosz rejected the expressionist spirit that was overtaking European art in the early decades of the 20th 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.
ED RUSCHA
Words, humour, and the great American iconography are the three themes that underpin so much of Ruscha’s work. Actual Size is a perfect synthesis of these ideas in this period, operating on multiple levels as both an artwork and a visual joke. Painted the same year that Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans were shown, it was part of a new movement in art that co-opted the insignia and objects of American Life and elevated them into art forms. Yet Ruscha went one step further than Warhol – rather than simply depicting the product and its wordmark, he took inspiration from Chuck Yeager, an early astronaut and flying ace, who described took issue with the new, heavily automated spaceships that reduced their pilots to simple being ‘Spam in a Can’. Ruscha’s Spam takes flight, leaving a streak behind it as it soars across the white field. This is a monumental work that brings us in and out of context, recontextualising the word and the product while also serving as an ode to the great American processed meat.
UNKNOWN AUSTRIAN MASTER
In the fledgling beginnings of the Northern Renaissance, removed the cultural epicentre of Italy whose artistic style was progressing ahead of its northern neighbours, artists were rediscovering a representational style that had been lost for centuries. Perspectival drawing was mastered by the ancient world who, across generations of trial and error, discovered the secrets to representing a three-dimensional world onto a flat plane. But in the preceding centuries, the skills and knowledge of this style were lost – until, that is, the arrival of the renaissance at the end of 14th century. In the early decades of this revolution, we can witness the evolution of this style in real time, watch masterful artists create life from tempera, wood and brushes, and, in their completed works, see the successes and the failures go hand in hand. The results are poignant and surreal, as exemplified in this work by an unknown Austrian master. Figures’ scale changes with no relation to their positioning on the canvas, but this allows us to see their expressions more clearly. Detailed faces seem to sit in biologically impossible positions which only emphasises the anguish. For each imperfection, something is gained, and the immaculate detail of this work, both in narrative and emotion, is possible only for the slight naivety of its style.
GEORGE BELLOWS
When he passed away at the age of 42, George Bellows was regarded as one of the greatest American artists of his day. Today, his fame has waned and he is no longer the household name he once was. Yet Bellows is well worth remembering for his vivid, enigmatic and striking portraits of New York, that straddled class and politics. Bellows was part of a group of anarchist, liberal artists and activists known as ‘The Lyrical Left’, advocating for individual rights and freedom. Yet Bellows was often at odds with the group – he saw artistic freedom as tantamount, and far more important than ideological politics. Bellows depicted tenement housing, boxing matches and the lower classes of the city, but he also mingled with the high society. Here, he depicts a tennis tournament in Rhode Island as both a social event and a sporting one. His interest is in the setting, the atmosphere, the palpable, searing heat, more than it is about the tennis. He captures a slice of life, a vignette of existence in broad, vivid strokes.
PIETER BRUEGEL
‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ A unified, monolingual human race, working together as they traverse eastward come to the land of Shinar and begin to build a tower, high up into the sky. Yahweh, seeing them rise higher to the heavens and feeling threatened by the power of a species that can all communicate, confounds their speech, creating hundreds of different of languages so they can no longer understand each other, and the tower begins to break, scattering them all over the world. This is the story that Bruegel is telling, one of hubris and futility, of humans who aspire to divinity and have their pride punished. He paints the tower before it’s destruction, being built in a spiral upwards, but there are cracks showing and we see bricks beginning to fall. We are, he is trying to tell us, so arrogant to think we can reach God when our earthly craftsmanship is not even able to build a strong tower.
BARBARA KRUGER
We are living in a world Barbara Kruger predicted, criticised, and one she accidentally helped create. It is because of this that it’s easy to misread her critique and her skewering as endorsement. Her text-on-image works that started in the late 1970s were a radical attack on commercialism, a call to arms for women to open their eyes to a capitalist society trying to commodify themselves. For nearly 50 years, Kruger has been creating works that juxtapose archival imagery with her direct statements, commands to the viewer that remove the subtext from the advertising copy we are inundated with. She used the tactics of advertising and media industries, tactics designed steal time and arrest the viewer, to subvert the message of the medium. It is perhaps ironic then, that her italic, capitalised Futura font words have since adorned hundreds of thousands of t-shirts, skateboards and well-hyped products from the streetwear brand Supreme who co-opted Kruger’s signature style. Kruger has been commodified by a world she fought against, but her work still cuts through, more urgent than ever before.
GEORGES BRAQUE
To upend art history, you have to be committed to its traditions. For Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who together created the visual vocabulary of modernity, this tradition began and would be dismantled with the ‘Still Life’. Using the motifs, objects and arrangements that have pervaded painted works for centuries, they disorientate the viewer while giving just enough context and knowledge to ground them. To look at Braque’s work today is to see it fitting neatly within the very art history he sought to topple, but this still life was a radical work. We are given the base of a table, its legs strangely foreshortened but it places us within a known entity. So too, the objects are familiar iconography – fruit, a guitar, a stoneware jug, music sheets and others. Yet each object has it’s own perspective, it does not conform within a singular vision but instead shows a world of multiplicity. Braque’s table could be viewed from infinite angles and still the objects upon it would never unify.
ARSHILE GORKY
An Armenian refugee, escaping the genocide, who took on the name of Georgian nobility and became one of America’s most influential and important painters, Gorky remains to this day enigmatic and illusive. Though his work does not immediately appear of the genre, Gorky was the spiritual founder of Abstract Expressionism. Andre Breton tried to claim him as a surrealist and the Paris School and New York School of Artists both consider Gorky a profound influence. His work is lyrically abstract, using biomorphic forms that simultaneously express pure emotion, transferred from mind to hand with no interference from the conscious, while being unplaceably figurative. He was a bridge between languages, inspiring the visual linguists who came after him and changing the way his contemporaries thought. More than just bridging movements, Gorky was a connection between European and American art worlds, fostering trans-Atlantic relationships that shrunk the world around him into a unified, collaborative place.
PIERRE BONNARD
Pierre Bonnard was a member of Les Nabis, an avant-garde, post-impressionist group of radical artists joined by a belief that art was not intended to represent nature but was instead a synthesis of symbols and metaphors of the artists ideas. His paintings were cosmopolitan, depicting urban life and intimate domestic scenes, and the forays into landscapes were static and devoid of human presence. Paul Signac, on the other hand, was a Pointillist who, together with Georges Seurat, created the new style of painting and used it to depict scenes of rural and Mediterranean life, alive with joyous, relaxed civilisation. So it should come as no surprise then, that this somewhat anomalous work in Bonnard’s career features at its centre a depiction of his friend from across the aisle, Signac. It is not just a literal depiction of him, surrounded by his friends helming a sailing boat, but Bonnard takes its further and paints like Signac, not in style but in content and feel. The work is alive, jubilant and reverent of nature – the philosophy of a companion translated through his personal lens.
YVES KLEIN
Klein replaced the paintbrush with the body. Working in collaboration with models covered in his signature blue paint, he instructed and directed them to push themselves against canvas and paper to leave remnants, ghostly leftovers, of their own form. This was a radical and controversial movement, not only for the perceived lewdness of the process, but because it took art our of the frame and placed it into everyday surroundings. It guided a passage from the material to the immaterial realm, beckoning in a transcendent idea of art that Klein believed in, one where the gulf between the human and the heavenly disappeared. On a visit to Hiroshima, Klein saw the impression of a man seared into stone, the mark of pain and destruction integrated man into the eternal nature that surrounded him. With more joy, freedom and intention, Klein was attempting the same with his Anthropometrie series. Bodies, flesh, and humans are mortal and transient, but we can coalesce with nature to rise above our mortality and reach the divine.
HENRI MATISSE
In the years after the first World War, Matisse’s wild Fauvism waned, and he became less concerned with translating his pure expressions through brushstrokes and developed into a more sophisticated style. ‘Tea’ is the largest and amongst the most accomplished of this period, with touches of Impressionism in the dappled sunlight and broad strokes, it communicates the lushness and comfort of the scene with clarity and beauty. Yet look a little deeper and we see further clues of Matisse’s radical origins. The face of Marguerite is distorted and in the style of the African masks that both Matisse and Picasso found so much inspiration in. It is an extension of his seminal sculptures that increasingly abstracted a female face, yet here in exists in domestic harmony, less radical and more a part of everyday life. Matisse’s revolution was accepted by the world, and this painting is testament to it’s integration in daily life.
REMBRANDT
Rembrandt’s house and possessions were repossessed. After years of success and acclaim, he had fallen on hard times and the year before this portrait was painted he had to satisfy his overdue creditors. In the midst of this personal turmoil, he did what he knew best and composed a self-portrait. Throughout his life, Rembrandt documented himself obsessively. We have so many self-portraits of the artist that they serve almost as a biography of his existence, tracking his meteoric rise and the joy of his artistry and success before moving into his reckoning with mortality and here, the reversion of his past glories. Rembrandt stares directly at us, his face sombre and his eyes heavy. The work is less technically perfect than much of his oeuvre, the paint thickly applied and lacking some of the fine detail of other portraits. Yet this leads to a more expressive work – the stresses and tribulations of his recent ordeals captured in tactility. He relinquishes technicality to show pain and sadness as raw, direct, and honest.
KARL SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF
In an artists colony by the Baltic Sea, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and his colleagues within the German Expressionist group Die Brücke practiced a back to nature, free love, bohemian lifestyle. Their summers were as much an extension of their avant-grade art as their paintings were, living true to the same principles they applied to canvas. Nude bathers, taking the form of anonymous and objectified female forms, blend into a landscape with few signifiers save for sparse grass and loose dune like shapes. The image intentionally reveals little, it aspires instead to a universal sensation of summertime - the deep ochre acting as an oppressive sun that coats all it touches and the grit of the brushstrokes like the coarse grains of sand against the revellers bodies. Schmidt-Rottluff’s evocative images laid the groundwork for the Expressionists that followed him but few captured a lifestyle in harmony with their art quite so potently.
HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
Toulouse-Lautrec captured the decadence of his age. The publicity, the cabaret, the drama, the cafes, the restaurants and the spectacle of the turn of the century exudes from his oeuvre, capturing the subtleties and lack thereof that he lived within. The Opera was a recurring theme for him, sexually charged, high society drama replete with costumes and theatre – the subject and the painter were natural bedfellows. Born into aristocracy, a childhood accident rendered him very short as an adult due to his undersized legs and in Paris he found more comfort and kindness in the brothels and bars than the upper-class world of his birth. Yet he participated in both, an outsider who was allowed in and could keenly observe the idiosyncrasies and beauty of these mirroring existences.
HENRI ROUSSEAU
It was Rousseau’s lack of training that allowed his genius to flourish. His unfamiliarity with the technical skills and historical knowledge, that those dominating the avant-garde had, set him apart and gave him the space to rise above them all and establish himself as one of the leading artistic figures of the post-impressionist movement. Working as a tax collector until he was 49, Rousseau retired from his lifetime job and began to work as an artist full time. He was ridiculed by critics for his naïve style, for the uncanny sense of strangeness that pervaded his work, it’s imperfections, formal idiosyncrasies and disarming scale marked down to inability rather than genius. It was Picasso, who saw a painting of Rosseau’s offered by a street seller as a used canvas to paint over, who realised that though the style was naïve, it was the world who was behind. His childish style would go on to influence a new world of avant-garde painting, spurring figures of the 20th century to try and paint like a child, or more accurately, paint in the way that was so innate to Rousseau.
HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER
Thomas Cromwell was a layman, the son of brewer, who worked his way up English society to be the right- hand man of King Henry VIII and one of the architects of the Reformation. His power would not last and he was ultimately executed by the King after an ill-fated plan of marriage lost the monarch popularity. But at the height of his powers, Cromwell commissioned Hans Holbein, the irregular court painter of Henry VIII, to paint this portrait of himself. Some 5 years earlier, Holbein had painted a remarkably similar portrait of Thomas More, Cromwell’s counterpart on the other side of the reformation and his sworn enemy. Yet in the years since More’s portrait was painted, Cromwell had helped engineer his downfall and when he came to commission his own, it is hard not to read it as a snub against his conquered enemy.
YAYOI KUSAMA
A constant battle for the infinity within the mind to exist in the world. From a young age, Kusama hallucinated – seeing nets of interconnected dots that expanded into infinity overlayed across her field of vision. People, flowers, furniture became backgrounds to a world playing out inside her head, and her father brought her paints and canvas to try and help her express what she felt. Over 70 years, she has dealt with this same theme, working from the psychiatric institution she checked herself into in 1970 and then never left, in performance, painting, sculpture and installation. But in 1960, she had just moved to New York, leaving behind a world of domestic house-wifery that her parents wanted for her, and she translated her visions in the simplest way she knew how, by painting them as she saw them. These Infinity Nets are works of mental struggle, and testament to the power of art to not just quiet thoughts but invite your viewer into the loudness your own mind,
WILLEM DE KOONING
A car speeds out of the city at breakneck speed, careening round a corner it blurs the landscape ahead of it in an urgent wonder. In a flurry of brushstrokes, De Kooning evokes as much the process of his painting as the need to escape in order to reach it, vibrant and bright colours evoke a flash of movement while the vast space of yellow conjures the open planes of the countryside, blinding in the summer sun. Willem De Kooning spent two summers in the early 1950s hiding out in East Hampton before settling there with his wife Elaine. The landscape and lifestyle inspired him, softening his darker palette into an altogether more joyous, calmer but no less visceral language. Montauk Highway exists in a tension between representation and abstraction, depicting movement and freedom just as much as it explores colour and form as simulacra of emotion.
ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
Following the death of Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene retreated to a life of solitude and quiet penitence, communing privately with God through prayer. This period in life was a favourite subject of artists of the Renaissance, but it was Gentileschi who brought it to life. Her saintly attributes, an ornament jar, crucifix, and skull, that were traditionally included to help the viewer identify the subject are gone. She is not in a state of penitence or atonement, but in a moment of overwhelming ecstasy, taken with the spirit of God she enters into a deeply personal and powerful moment. Gentileschi brings her close to us, almost voyeuristically, to that we are in the room with her during this quiet moment. It is sensual, her bare skin exposed, and the work of a female painter, rare in the time of the Renaissance, is clear in her deft handling of the folds of skin and the strength of passion she feels, that never moves into eroticism. Gentileschi brings a private movement with God into the public, and does so in a way that feels relatable, familiar to us the viewer, thus encouraging us to lose ourselves in ecstasy with a higher power.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
Is color more important than gesture in art? This was the question Helen Frankenthaler was addressing and for her, the answer was clear. Pioneering a ‘soak-stain’ technique, she would pour paint directly onto untreated canvases and let it sink into the fabric, leaving behind vibrant and uncontrolled stains. This was in stark opposition to her male Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Jackson Pollock amongst them, who used violent brushstrokes and expressive gesture in their works. Frankenthaler was part of a group of female artists that included Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, who’s works speak to a natural beauty, emphasising the palette that existed around them, rather than trying to create something alien. In Winter Hunt, an empty top half emphasises the interplay of the palette below, allowing the beauty of the rich stains to stand out. Though the human hand is not obvious, the drops and swirls clearly from a pouring technique, there is harmony to the work that is unmistakably human, albeit one in touch with the world around them.
WINSLOW HOMER
In England, after a decade of painting scenes of American idyll, Homer lost his innocence. The spontaneous, bright, and almost doll house quality of his early work, one preoccupied with a vision of his country and its beauty, dissipated and in its place came something more universal, touching a higher plane. It was this return from his 2 years away, that he moved to a small house some seventy feet from the sea in Maine and his subject matter became informed by the swell, the danger and the shimmering beauty of the water that he saw from his window each day. ‘Summer Night’ is a study of restraint, revealing just enough to create a sense of longing, but not so much that we can’t see ourselves in the scene. The soft focus of two dancers, watched by a group in shadows as the light glistens from the stormy sea behind them, captures a poignant romance that each of us can understand.
MAURICE PRENDERGAST
“Genius is the power of assimilation”, said Prendergast, and if so, ‘The Beach’ is the crowning achievement of his genius. Reworking an existing composition of his, of a subject he returned to regularly in his career, Prendergast seems to fill this painting with every imaginable influence, borrowing techniques, styles and images in equal measure from Medieval and Renaissance art, as well as modernist works of Pointillism and Impressionism and, even more directly, making over nods to Cezanne, Signac and Renoir. The painting becomes a work of fragments, a sort of jigsaw puzzle for the art historian who can spot Cezanne’s mountains in the background, poses from Northern Renaissance etchings and colour fields from the titans of French avant-garde. Yet all this is not to condemn the painting, nor make any judgement against its quality – Prendergrast for all of his influence is not derivative, instead he absorbs influence and translates them in multi-lingual beauty. He is able to see the scope of history and turn it into a definitively contemporary work.
GORDON ONSLOW FORD
Gordon Onslow Ford was the last of his kind – the final surviving surrealist who saw the world change in the image he had helped imagine. One of the few significant members of Breton’s group of surrealists and amongst the only native English speak, Onslow Ford abandoned a regimented and expected career in the Navy to live in Paris and fulfil his passion and purpose. Regularly attending the movements exclusive meetings at Cafè deux Magots in Paris, he ingratiated himself with every important member of the group, hosting them for summers at a chateau near Switzerland. Yet of all the group, it was his friendship with the architect Roberto Matta that most informed his work. Together, they studied the mathematical and the metaphysical, and from Matta’s architectural drawings he learned his own understanding of perspective. He combined the cosmic and the rational, bringing mystic and surrealist ideas into a mathematical framework to speak to an ordered chaos of reality.
WORKSHOP OF TINTORETTO
Within a single canvas, many stories from Exodus are told as time and place is flattened into a single plane. In the centre, the high priest collects ornaments to create a sculpture of the golden calf. The very same sculpture that far into the background we see him casting and, just in-front of that scene, we see completed, displayed on an altar and worshipped by a crowd of followers. At the top right, Moses receives the ten commandments high upon a hill, though the canvas was cut at some point destroying much of this scene. This impossible presentation of simultaneous events is framed by richly dressed onlookers, inviting us into the scene. Painted just after Tintoretto’s death by his studio, most likely looked over by his son, the composition is based on an earlier work painted by Tintoretto himself. The painting serves as a show of the workshops ability after the masters passing, and an allegory for the power of art to open the viewers eyes to new worlds.
JOHN STORRS
A new age had begun, one filled with technological wonders, hope and optimism. Yet but 1949, this had waned in the shadow of the war, and the open fields of potential seemed to yield less than they had promised. The human imagination that had so expanded at the turn of the century had been corrupted, and the artists who had first seized upon modernity, it seemed, had paid too much reverence to the bright future they saw ahead. Storrs was one such artist, having been part of the culture epoch in Paris that helped fuel the revolution in the new visual language. Yet his later work, like Woman Reading, addresses some of the naivety of his youth and the worship of the experienced world that had gone with it. Here, referential ties are still present, the figure and the setting are clear, but it has been reduced to simplicity, to something more formal and abstract that speaks to a universal detachment as much as it does his personal expression. Storr’s work grew with him, and it’s in subtle cues, showed the changing optimism of a new century becoming old.
ROBERT RYMAN
In 1960, Robert Ryman was working as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. His co-workers, working security and front desk respectively, were Dan Flavin, Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt. Ryman had moved to New York eight years earlier with the hopes of making it as a jazz musician, and took up the job at MOMA as a means for cash. Yet inspired by this environment, and the artistic contemporaries working alongside him, Ryman took up painting, though not in any traditional sense. Eschewing the vogue of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Ryman opted for austere, monkish works comprised mostly of thickly applied white paint. He stayed with these ideas for the better part of 6 decades. Ryman wanted to remove the distraction of colour, form and figure and create works that forced a focus on tactility and light. His works are incomplete until they exist in an environment, for the subtle changes of light and shadow complete the blank squares. The economy and simplicity are pleasing, but the works ultimate role is to ask a philosophical question; what is painting?
GUSTAVE DORÉ
“Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea!”, so speaks the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s epic poem from 1798. A tale of desolation, horror, isolation and despair, its words on issues of faith, morality, and the very nature of man inspired artists from the moment it was published and continue to do so to this day. It is unsurprising then, that Gustave Doré, the most celebrated printmaker and illustrator of his day, chose Coleridge’s work, alongside Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ and Cervante’s ‘Don Quixote’, as a text to illustrate. His wood engravings, printed in stark blacks, capturing the pervading sense of danger and loneliness that seeps from every line of the poem. There is something uncomfortably peaceful about the impending doom of this image, the riotous sea dissolving into delicate fractals as the boat is held suspended atop a wave, illuminated by the sharp white of moonlight atop the crests. Doré captures the essence of the poem in his images, transforming wood and ink into lyrical works that plunder the depths of our soul.
GEORGES MATHIEU
Mathieu saw the movement of ‘Lyrical Abstraction’ that he created as a conclusion to the revolution of art history, following in the slipstream of freedom that avant-garde movements before him allowed. Impressionism freed the artwork from realism, Cubism from shapes, Geometric abstraction from the representation of perceived reality and lyrical abstraction was the final destruction. ‘Henceforth in the history of shapes as in the history of the world’, said Mathieu, ‘the sign precedes its meaning’. His work was freed from the requirements of meaning, he painted with gesture and passion, and painted in public in early happenings that broke down the barriers between artist and observer. He saw public creation as an act of true and joyful communion, a connection built from the shared focus on a visual impetus that requires no context to understand. Mathieu’s lyrical abstraction was not the conclusion he hoped it would be, movements after him returned meaning to their signs, but to look at his large scale works is to see an artist totally unchained, aesthetics that are freed from millennia of expectations to sing of total freedom.