ROY LICHTENSTEIN
There is the deception of ease in Lichtenstein’s paintings. So accurately does he recreate the medium of comic books and mass production that one can forget the painstaking work he undertook to hand-paint each benday dot, flat plane and standardised type. Recontextualising frames from the comic books, in this case DC’s ‘Girls Romance’, which were experiencing a new renaissance by the early 1960s, he brought the visual language of the masses into high art. By isolating single frames, outside of the narrative in which they were intended, Lichtenstein frees them to interpretation and makes us question why we see them as different worth if shown on the page versus the canvas. “I don’t think that whatever is meant by the artist it is important to art.”, he said. Instead, we are free to interpret these images, conceived first by comic book artist and then by Lichtenstein, however we please. This, ultimately, is the difference between the source material and finished work – removing the context and narrative removes the intention of the artist, leaving the viewer to finish the piece simply by looking at it.
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 20th 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.
GIOVANNI BELLINI
St. Francis steps out into the sun and prepares himself to transcend from his mortal self. Golden rays shine down on him as he receives stigmata, the wounds of crucifixion on your hands and feet, and in doing so becomes something closer to the divine. Bellini, the revolutionary of the Venetian Renaissance, was from a family of artists and, by the time this work was painted, was himself well established and well-trained, with a growing reputation as an artist of singular talent. So it is with total knowledge of conventions that Bellini chooses to break them. Iconographic motifs that appear across religious works and are used as a sort of codex to identify figures by the objects that appear around them or physical characteristics that are exaggerated are totally ignored in Bellini’s representation. Instead, he paints a masterful landscape, worthy of the glory of the divine, and places St. Francis alone, with no angels or heavenly representatives to aide him in his transform, in its beauty.
JOHN MARTIN
A battle cry against civility, against progress and technology, against domination by others – the Bard is a celebration of the primitive, the natural, and the spiritual. As King Edward I’s forces march on to conquer Wales, they are stopped by a Welsh Bard who curses the king, conjures his victims and predicts the rise of Wales and a new dawn of language in Britain – that of the Romantic Poets. Martin’s painting is inspired by the poem of the same name by Thomas Gray, capturing the drama of the scene and power of the bard, his proportion inhuman compared to the landscape and the invading army. Yet Martin captures something the poem could not: a breadth of beauty within the landscape, imposing and magic it unfurls ahead of us and dwarfs Edward’s men. The Bard, however, fits right in, his flowing robe mirrored in the rocks, trees and clouds around him. It is clear that this is his land and Martin deflty shows us why it is worth protecting. “Enough for me: with joy I see / The different doom our Fates assign. / Be thine Despair, and scept'red Care, / To triumph, and to die, are mine." / He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height / Deep in the roaring tide he plung'd to endless night.”
ALBERT ANDRÉ
Albert André is perhaps best remembered as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s closest friend, and André was devoted to this friendship past Renoir’s death. Arriving in Paris in 1889 as an industrial designer, he began to study at the Academie Julien where he met the new class of French artists shaping the world around them. Yet he never formally joined a movement or integrated himself in the milieu until his paintings caught the eye of Renoir. Though much older than him, the two became friends quickly and Renoir served also as a mentor to the young André. When Renoir died, it was André who produced the most significant monograph and he who persevered above all else to cement his friend’s legacy. He saw in his mentor that which he struggled to find himself, a pure and true genius and he was devoted to the sharing of this. Yet André was a skilled painter in his own right, learning from Renoir but with a unique eye, his work stands alone, vibrant, moody and revelatory. He sacrificed recognition of his own in awe and admiration of his friend.
LORSER FEITELSON
In the late 50s and early 60s in California, a group of artists reacted against the gestural, painterly style of abstract expression to create a new genre known as ‘Hard-Edge Painting’. It is as the name suggests defined by abrupt transitions from one plane of colour to another, decisive and sudden with no gentle movement. At the heart of this burgeoning movement was Lorser Feitelson who distilled the abstract forms of figurative art into evocative, hypnotic, and ambiguous compositions. A working artist since 1945, Feitelson’s career reads as a microcosm of art history, moving from Cubism to surrealism, to abstraction and finally to the style that defined him and offered him the home he had been searching for, Hard-Edge painting. Feitelson was informed by the biomorphic curves of the body and of the nature around him but reduced it into simple formal elements. His work is one of geometric beauty, elegantly proportioned and sensuous in its clarity.
PABLO PICASSO
As the circus in Montmatre, Paris, closed for the night, Picasso would stay behind and converse late into the night with the performers. They existed in these hours in a kind of netherworld, a liminal space between the cosmopolitan reality outside and the escapist spectacle that had just been. It was this bridge-like state between two worlds that drew the young Picasso to them, finding refuge, solace, and solidarity as he was navigating a similar transition. Painted at the very end of his ‘Blue Period’, characteristic by the morose subjects and blue hues, and as he began to enter his ‘Rose Period which was more optimistic and livelier and ultimately brought him his first taste of the fame and success that would follow, this work is one of ambiguity. The two performers stare out listlessly, the dimensionless background behind fades into them as they stand, with the suggestion of applause yet it brings them neither joy nor sadness – instead they exist between the two.
REMBRANDT
Few painters documented themselves as prolifically and honestly as Rembrandt. More than 70 self-portraits are known, not including the numerous works of biblical stories where he inserted his image as a bystander, a saint, or a historical figure. He spent hours staring into a mirror, contemplating his face and the minutiae of changes different expressions produced – often using these as studies for larger works. He was, in this way, his own muse, finding inspiration for soaring works of religious significance in the lines of his mouth and the lilt of his face. Yet this work, early in his oeuvre, is something altogether different. It is not preparatory or in service of a greater work but a complete artwork in its own right. The artist is in shadows, quiet contemplation looks out from his eyes as if asking the viewer for reassurance of the painting’s quality. As Rembrandt aged, his self-portraits became more explicit, more comfortable in the bright light that revealed the intricacies of his character, yet here there exist a youthful lack of surety that retreats into the safety of darkness.
GIACOMO BALLA
While his contemporaries depicted their ideas of movement through violence, machines, and the violence of machines, Balla explored it with a lightness of touch, a sense of beauty and whimsy in the word and a pervading witticism. A leading Italian Futurist, a movement which as the name suggests was concerned with the dynamism of the hyper-modern, it’s speed, youth, automation and movement, Balla embraced the central philosophies of the movement while implicitly rejecting the sanctioned approach. He instead saw modernity as not something to be feared, not something lacking humanity in the face of machines but instead found the idiosyncrasies of the everyday experience and depicted them through the cerebral ideas of the contemporary age. In his depiction of numbers, Balla brought the warmth of the human and the beauty of imperfection to the great signifiers of rationality and objectivity. His title is revealing, by bringing mathematics into art, it not only helps the latter but makes the former pleasing, freeing them from the confines of their need for perfection.
SALVADOR DALÍ
In the 1950s, still reeling from the psychological shock of the atomic bomb and frustrated with the growing ‘I, Me, Mine’ mindset of post war individualism, Salvador DalÍ found his faith. Integrating a fascination with atomic physics with Spanish mysticism, DalÍ began to see the two schools of thought as one and the same. The atom took on a metaphysical form, representing the unity of the universe, Christ himself. We see this clearly in this most strange of religious painting, as a foreshortened Christ, seen as if from a human perspective as he rises above and away from us on the ground. His body forms a triangle representing the holy trinity and he moves towards a glowing, yellow circle, the nucleus of an enlarged atom. DalÍ plays with perspective, each element of the painting seemingly seen from a different viewpoint and as Christ ascends, he does so not into some distant nothingness or faraway heaven but towards a nearby sun, into the atom that binds all of us together as one.
YVES TANGUY
A strange alien landscape in gradated shades of grey that offer no clear horizon, only an infinite expanse towards nothingness. On the front plane, a dense smattering of anthropomorphic objects that appear at a glance familiar reveal themselves to be wholly unknowable on inspection. Yves Tanguy met the father of Surrealism in 1925 and, a year later, wholeheartedly joined the movement, with his involvement reaching something of a culmination in this large scale canvas that meticulously depicts the impossible world of our dreams, while calling towards the desolate Brittany landscape of Tanguy’s childhood. The work was called, with typical surrealist mystery, ‘I Await You’, and three years after its completion it enraptured an American painted named Kay Savage. She arranged an introduction through a mutual friend and within a few years they began a marriage that lasted the rest of their lives. There were no coincidences in surrealism – Tanguy painted with the subconscious knowledge that someone was missing from his life and it was the painting, not him, that found her.
BANG HAI JA
As a sickly child growing up in South Korea, Bang Hai Ja lay in bed and watched through the window as light danced off a stream in her grandparents garden. While other children played, she became obsessed with sunlight and how she could capture its illusive beauty through brushes and paints. When she died at the age of 85, Hai Ja was known the world over as ‘the artist of light’, and so celebrated for her depictions of light in all of its forms that the young girl looking out her window would not believe how well she accomplished her dream. Hai Ja’s dedication to light was not purely aesthetic, she understood light as the beginning and end of the everything, the first creation of the universe and to where the universe and its being will all return. This is reflected not just in the work, but in the process. Hai Ja only uses natural materials, infusing her work with the lifeblood of the universe, and begins each piece with a crumpled piece of handmade paper placed in the centre, from which the rest of the composition is built around. This is the first light, the origins of the universe, brought alive by Hai Ja again and again.
ROBERT MANGOLD
An architect’s lines against a field of colour with hues so subtle it almost becomes transparent. Robert Mangold’s work takes the simplest formal objects, the base geometric shapes, and through subtle manipulation, makes us dwell on them. Working as a security guard at the MOMA in 1962, his colleagues were Robert Ryman, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin and Lucy Lippard, and he began to develop his abstract language. His career has been uncompromising and certain, developing a single theme for more than 50 years in various iterations, he stands amongst a small group who have been able to sustain their position. He relies on the intuitive, and the apparent reductiveness of his paintings gives way to a complex understanding of space. Painting is, for Mangold, “the most difficult art to grasp”. “If you come into a room where there’s an installation or a sculpture, you know to walk around it, it exists in your space with you; there’s no way to kill time in front of a painting.”
MILTON AVERY
At the start of his career, in the first quarter of the 20th Century, Milton Avery was overlooked for being too radical, too abstract and not figurative enough for the vogue of the day. Some 20 years later, when Abstract Expression rose to be the dominant American art movement, Milton Avery was overlooked once again for being too figurative and not abstract enough. An artist perpetually caught in the middle, he was nonetheless a hugely respected figure and a mentor and inspiration to a young Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib who saw a way forward through his abstracted, flat, colourful images. Avery and his wife Sally created what became known as the Avery Style, developing a color plane style of painting and color theory to go alongside, they were considered on par only with Matisse in their understanding of palettes. Today, Avery’s images feel contemporary and familiar, so influential and stolen has his style been. Yet more than 100 years, Avery was taking unknown steps into representation, striving towards a new future that was as beautiful as it was colorful.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Part joke, part conceptual artwork, part legally binding financial document, the Monte Carlo Bonds capture so much of what was brilliant, chaotic and confounding about the great Marcel Duchamp. Having once again tried to abandon his calling as an artist, Duchamp spent night after night in the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, devising what he thought was a perfect system for roulette involving increasingly intricate dice rolls to decide the numbers to bet on. It was slow, economical and, he said, played over enough time tipped the odds to give him a slight edge over the house, guaranteeing eventual profit. Yet the process was slow using Duchamp’s capital and so he looked outwards, offering friends the chance to buy into his scheme if only they would front him the money. Those that did, received these bonds in return, which entitled them to profit shares after every 100,000th roll on the wheel. Even in his attempted rejection of art, Duchamp made the world conceptual and beautiful.
CARAVAGGIO
In domesticity, holiness can appear. The sublime enters daily life and interrupts routine, and we may not recognise it without being told. Such is the story of the resurrected Jesus appearing in the town of Emmaus that the great Renaissance master Caravaggio depicts here. Two disciples, Luke and Cleophas, and an innkeeper are having dinner when Christ appears in a different form, here represented as without his beard, and joins them. They do not recognise him at first, and it is only when he has broken bread to they realise that they are in the presence of their teacher and the Son of God, risen from the dead. Just as soon as they do, he vanishes before their eyes and is not seen again. Caravaggio paints this moment of realisation, the two men in awe while the innkeeper looks on, seemingly oblivious to their moment of clarity. The painting does not emphasise holiness, Christ’s glory is unexalted, he is but a man, though more delicate and pure than the rugged disciples either side of him. This is the height of Jesus’ humanity, so at one with the mortal that he is able to join them for dinner as an equal and Caravaggio urges us not to ignore where the glory of god may appear in our daily, domestic lives.
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.
PIERRE BONNARD
Art was Pierre Bonnard’s only option. After failing his entry examination to practice law, he fell in with a group of disparate but commonly ambitious young artists who soon became known as the Nabis. They were unified by a common idea – that a work of art was not about a depiction of nature but rather a synthesis of metaphors and symbols into a unified aesthetic work. Their name derived from the Hebrew term for prophet, as this group of radical young creatives were, even in their contemporary age, ushering in a new way of understanding. Bonnard was the greatest of the Nabis, a prophet among prophets who unified a love of Japanese art, graphic illustration and Gaugin’s paintings into works of decadent, detailed, simple beauty.
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BERNARD BUFFET
In the 1950s, Bernard Buffet was one of the most famous artists in the world. Talked about in the same breath as Picasso, at the age of 21 he was a star of Post-War Paris with a prolific output of paintings and solo shows every year. Buffet was known as a ‘Miserabilist’, an art movement of just one that was characterised by his long faced subjects, thick, impassioned black lines, palette of grays, and often bleak subject matter. He was internationally famous, escaping the confines of the art world to become a known entity to the general public who caused stampedes with each new exhibitions and work that adorned magazines, albums, plastic bags, postage stamps, and posters. Yet as his fame rose, so did his wealth and he began to live a wildly decadent life complete with a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and a castle in the countryside. His life seemed to be at odds with the style and subjects of his paintings, and as images of this decadence became proliferated, the public turned against Buffet. By the late 1960s, he was but a footnote in art history, though to look at his paintings now is to still see the same power, intensity, and misery that was the cause for so much celebration in the post-war years.
ÉDOUARD VUILLARD
Vuillard was a Nabi. A member of the semi-secret, semi-mystic group of artists who met at apartments and coffee shops in the late 1800s, plotting a revolution of art by stripping it down to its most base elements. Yet Vuillard’s ambitions and influences could not be contained, and when the group splintered and split up at the turn of the century, he found a new freedom of expression. Integrating a love of Japanese art, theatre and set design and decorative arts, he returned to interior scenes he had painted as a Nabi with a newfound vigour. Vuillard matches his subject with their surroundings, spending more time in the exterior world around them than on the subject themselves. Here, the fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin exists in exquisite harmony with the room, each object, detail, brushstroke of the interiors reveals something of Lanvin’s interior life.
FRANCIS PICABIA
Dada was raging, the machines were taking over, and Francis Picabia was amongst the most celebrated artists in the world. Automation, industrialization and war were in the air, and the avant-garde responded with the embrace of nonsense. In precarious times, why pay any attention to logic, reason, or the accepted philosophies of the day when they had led to nothing but pain and strife? It was in this epoch that Picabia began his ‘mechanical drawings’, inspired equally by the machine like works of Duchamp as he was by the military illustrations of weaponry, he drew works of aesthetic rigidity, seemingly educational at first glance, but which fell apart into surreal irrationality with any close inspection. This work is from a series of portraits depicting his friends as various mechanical objects. Here, the photographer and critic Paul Haviland is shown as a desk lamp, disconnected from his power source as he left New York to look after his father. The translation of Picabia’s fittingly absurd title is simple: ‘Poetry is like him. Here is Haviland’
ETEL ADNAN
“ Every painting by [Paul] Klee”, Annan once said of her artistic hero and early influence, “is like an act of discovery, achieved through a process of exploration, like a boat in the ocean.” To look at her work is to see much the same process - a compositional world rife with color and figuration that seems to morph and change before our very eyes. Centered with a sun like mass, simple forms in rudimentary but perfectly balanced color move around it, offering interpretations of landscape but not requiring such formal or prescriptive description. It is unsurprising, not just in looking at Adnan’s paintings, to see a kinship between herself and Paul Klee, one of the great geniuses of early 20th century modernism. Like Klee, Adnan cannot be defined simply by one practice, and does not want to be. She is considered one of the most important and certainly most celebrated Arab writers of the modern age. As a poet, essayist, and journalist, Adnan pushes the written word to bold, unusual, tender, and exciting spaces - writing on myriad topics yet finding such lyrical life in all of them. Her visual art, like Klee’s, should not be seen or understood differently, simply as a different medium to express consistent ideas and questions; her brilliance can not be bound to simply paper or canvas alone, and throughout her life she let it find its home wherever it sought refuge.
DORA MAAR
In the public imagination, Dora Maar is perhaps most readily known as Picasso’s great lover and the subject of Weeping Woman, amongst his most important and famous works. Yet this understanding is grounded in so much historical misogyny, and the constant erasure and redefinition of female artists as muses for their male counterparts. Maar was seismic and seminal in her own right, one of the most important photographers in the mediums burgeoning days, and a pioneering image maker across the camera and brush. Studying painting and photography at one of Paris’ most progressive art schools in the 1920s, she quickly began creating remarkable works, combining her images into surreal photomontages and staging eerie, uncanny scenes. She was commissioned by fashion brands, advertisers, and galleries to construct her strange worlds that seemed to blend dreams and reality, with a level of subconscious eroticism throughout them all. Alongside this, she worked as a street photographer, documenting the increasing poverty in Europe with a fast action Rollei-Flex, which she would in turn sometimes use in her collages. Maar has, in recent years, reclaimed her place as a pioneering and foundation figure of surrealism, and a leader of early centuries’ photography movement, on par with Man Ray.
JEAN ARP
An animalistic figure, at once grotesque and elegant with flowing blue hair, a sprawling bust, and strange heeled legs dances across a golden plain. After some years away from the Dada movement, of which he had been a founding member, Tänzenir is a sort of reconnection with the humour and irony that defined the group. It is playful and surreal, defying our expectations of how a dancer should be represented - the figure is not graceful in a classic sense, their body seems to escape its confines at each turn and the bright primary colors of their form add a playful, childlike energy to the movements. Arp’s wife, Sophie Tauber-Arp, was herself a great artist and also a dancer and this ethereal evocation can be understood as a representation of her modernist choreography, making this a surreal, humorousness portrait of a wife by her husband.
ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN
A portrait hides elegant geometry. Rogier van der Weyden was breaking from the traditional norms across multiple planes. He rejected the Western Renaissance’s attempt to create idealised figures, instead focusing on naturalistic depictions of his subjects. Their imperfection is their beauty, and he attempted to capture his sitters as he saw them, emphasising their features with dramatic lighting that creates an almost gothic realism. Yet if you un-focus your eyes, the work becomes a study of mathematics. The rectangles of her veil, the triangle of her neckline and sharp angles of her face turn the sitter into a figure of profound compositional simplicity. Van der Weyden’s portrait of an unnamed woman has become amongst the most famous and revered portraits in history. It’s power lies in it’s remarkable austerity, capturing a moment of emotion told in the lines and sight of a face.
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JOSEF ALBERS
When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 under the order of the Nazi party, Josef and Anni Albers fled Germany to America where they became the first permanent faculty at the Black Mountain College. A radical centre for artistic education that became a breeding ground for so many of the figures who defined American modernity, the Albers were a central part of the cultural and creative ecosystem. Both in Germany, and in America, Josef Albers primary concern was color, and his ‘Homage to a Square’ series was produced throughout his life and laid the foundation for contemporary color theory. Yet coming to rural North Carolina from the flatlands of Weimar seemed to open up a new geometric, formal interest in Albers. As illustrated with this print, made just a year after his arrival, he explores how organic curves and gentle forms play with sharp, rigid lines. Produced in monochrome, this is a work uninterested in color and fascinated with shape, a work that represents new possibilities in the face of such devastation.
BRICE MARDEN
Inspired by the poems of Hanshan, a 9th Century Chinese poet who lived in willing exile in the mountains where he wrote his poems on rocks, trees and cave walls, Marden created 6 large scale works. Hanshan’s poems are immensely spirituality in the Taoist and Zen traditions, and Marden’s work are implicitly informed by this. Bridging a gap between the real and the imagined, the formal and the abstract, the natural and the unnatural, Cold Mountain 6 is about the in-between space where peace lives. He painted the canvases from the bottom to top and left to write, so as to mirror the Chinese writing system and in this way the painting can be seen also as calligraphic abstractions. What is left behind when we remove meaning from beauty?
ANDY GOLDSWORTHY
Goldsworthy is not monumental; he is but a vehicle to amplify the world he loves. Small, subtle interventions in the landscape are the root of his practice. Sculptures that last as long as nature dictates, piles of leaves painstakingly organised are dispersed with the wind and formations of sticks live at the will of the tides. In their brief moments of life, Goldsworthy’s works are exemplars of staggering beauty, but this beauty can only exist if we accept that they are transient. Nature is Goldsworthy’s collaborator and his teacher. “I take the opportunities each day offers”, he says, “if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn.”
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET
The Angelus took on spiritual and religious significance far beyond its painter’s intentions. It spawned a patriotic fervour when it nearly left France, inspired a madman to attack it with a knife, became an obsession of Salvador Dali, spawned an artistic revolution that informed Van Gogh, Matisse, Seurat and Cezanne and is well regarded as one of the greatest religious works of all time. All of this for a work of tranquil reverence, made from nostalgia Millet felt towards his grandmother. It depicts two labourers, upon hearing the church bell toll for the end of the day, in quiet prayer. Millet did not paint it as a religious work, yet he captured the essence of faith, of the serenity of devotion across society. It is not grand nor biblical, but honest and humble, truer to religious values that so many works of splendour. The significance of The Angelus comes from its depiction of the seemingly insignificant.
GEORGES BRAQUE
Under the strong light of Southern France, Georges Braque started a brief and important affair with Fauvism. He joined the movement late and left early, the whole relationship lasting less than a year and few works resulting from it. Within a year of this work, together with Picasso, Braque would lay the foundations of Cubism, bring sharp geometry and simultaneous perspective to a more subdued colour palette, but it was his time in southern France as temporary Fauvist that allowed this revolution to happen. Braque painted most of his Fauvist works in the fishing villages of La Ciotat and l’Estaque, favourites of Paul Cézanne. Under the shadow of Cézanne’s legacy, Braque drew the ordinary ahead of him and imbued it with magic. Cubism was, for Braque, purely an extension of the ideas Cézanne had started a half-century before, and Braque’s affair with Fauvism was, more than anything, an affair with the spirit of Cézanne who guided him to stranger, more powerful things.