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.

HONORÉ DAUMIER

A prolific artist and a professional caricaturist, these two pursuits, which to Daumier seemed hardly worth distinguishing, were at odds with each other in the public eye. Born into a working-class family, Daumier worked tirelessly from the age of 12 training as an artist and developing a keen eye for the details of society and a revolutionary witticism. By 20 he was producing caricatures for satirical political papers and was arrested for his unflattering depictions of the King Louis Philippe I. This brought with it renown and favour, his works were seen by many and well admired across society yet when he tried to show his paintings and his work as a fine artist, he was rejected almost outright for stepping out of his lane. Few recognised his artistic brilliance and saw his value only as a caricaturist. In the final year of his life, a solo show of his work was shown and, in the months before he died, he received the recognition that had been kept from him.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

More than eight hundred canvases were left in the artist’s studio after his death, in various stages of completion, and this was one of them. Cut from a larger study that contained multiple variations of a similar composition, this small rectangular still life was mounted alone as a work worthy of its own frame. The fruit seems almost alive, so ripe and ready to eat that each individual fig and apple casts a halo of freshness around itself as if inviting the viewer to reach through the oil and grab it. All of which is in sharp contrast to the dainty porcelain of the bowl in the middle, the handles protruding with delicacy outwards to the scene of objects it cannot hold. When Renoir painted this work, his arthritis had become debilitating and his technique was a world away from the one he had used as a young man. The vivid and broad brushstrokes came not, initially, from aesthetic choice but from necessity as it changed his visual language to one he was physically able to achieve. Yet the strange paradox at the heart of it seems to be that as Renoir aged, his works took on a vitality and virility that imbues them with youth and energy far above any of his earlier paintings.

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

Born into aristocracy but shunned for his disabilities, Toulouse-Lautrec retreated into the underbelly of society, and shone a light on the darkness of glamour at the heart of Paris. In the Cabaret shows that he frequented, alongside a group of outcasts, hustlers, performers and runaways, one of the performers sung stories of the character Rosa La Rouge. A murderous prostitute who tormented Paris, this fictional figure became embedded in Toulouse-Lautrec’s mind and he painted her here, using his favourite model Carmen Gaudin. He works like a filmmaker, capturing her in movement and motion, her hair obscuring her eyes and a sharp chin that points outward menacingly. There is little judgement in the oil, but nor is there celebration; his imagined image of this maligned figure is treated with dignity and respect. The painting hung in the same nightclub that the Cabarets featuring La Rouge were performed in, the large scale of the work haunting the venue like a spectre.

MARCEL JANCO

As one of the founders of Dada, alongside a group of 5 other artists living in Zurich during the first world war, Janco had abilities of creation that had not yet been invented. Joined by his brothers from their native Romania, he upturned the European consciousness with works of absurdism and chaos, fighting against a logic of rationality that seemed to imprison the youth in a life that hardly felt living. Yet, not 4 years after the founding of the group, Janco and his co-founder Hans Arp abandoned the movement to spread the word of Constructivism across Eastern Europe. In doing so he traded a rejection of the institutional ways of thinking that were still impacting contemporary life to a total embrace of hyper-modernity, and a way of creating that was not meant to be in rebellion to but in reflection of the modern age. This plaster relief was made only a few months before this dissent, and the constructivist influence is already clear, with sharp angular lines that pierce and aspire to perfection, but the Dada is in him too with a composition that warps perspective and ignores the laws of nature.

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

Misery came not from surprise but from knowledge. The prophet Jeremiah had foreseen the destruction of Jerusalem and had urged penitence on behalf of those whose sinfulness was the root cause of the inevitable siege. Yet his calls had not been heeded, and that what he had foreseen came to light brought no satisfaction, only the sadness that he could not have changed the fate he saw in his visions. Rembrandt depicts him here as old and world-weary, having received the prophesies as a young man it is as if the weight of his knowing has taken its toll. He sits alone, the drama heightened by stark contrasts between the light and dark, and he appears as a solitary figure, made so by the unique knowledge of the future he was given by god. The riches in front of him offer no solace, and Rembrandt’s ode to this reluctant prophet is one of deep empathy, his personal suffering becomes analogous to that of Jerusalem.

CLAUDE MONET

Monet put himself in the picture and broke a cardinal rule of the movement he had created. Though Impressionism did not attempt to replicate life, it valued the subjective truth of observation above all else, with an intense focus on light and colour to portray the titular ‘impression’ of the scene being painted. Here, Monet works en plein air, the act of painting outdoors, to capture the soft hues of the Siene in situ, playing with the light so exactly that we can sense the hour of the day in which he was painting. These works were not unusual in his oeuvre, his Siene paintings are numerous and the studio boat depicted was purchased by him in order to allow him to get greater views from which to execute a greater number of these works. Yet, in this painting, Money depicts himself in the studio boat he paints, betraying his observation with a depiction he could only imagine. He places himself in the centre of the scene, emphasising the creative role of the artist and the autonomy of painting as an act made by the individual.

JOAN MIRO

Abstract screams ring across a smoky landscape. Bright colors try to break through, being choked by darkness that swirl around them leaving only the ghost of their presence behind. The figures reveal little of their origin, anthropomorphic shapes that exist in a nether-world of nature, changing species with each observation – save for the unmistakable mouth of a human that forms the central focus of this work. She is a woman, and she screams towards the sky in desperation in agony as the bombs of the Spanish civil war fall around her. Picasso had revealed Guernica, his masterpiece in protest of the same war, the previous year, and the pose of Miró’s screaming women matches almost perfectly that of a horse in the right of Picasso’s work. An almost unclassifiable artist, Miró’s work veered between surrealism, fauvism, and expressionism but remained always uniquely his own. Often childlike and plumbing the depths of his subconscious, this work oozes with a tragedy and darkness quite unusual for the artist known for his playful, witty works.

JOSEPHINUS AUGUSTUS KNIP

For three years, the Dutch painter Josephus Augustus Knip lived in Rome, and would frequently travel around Italy to visit sites of historical importance and natural beauty. He painted watercolours during this time, and made constant sketches of his surroundings, depicting the soaring Italian landscape and the crumbling beauty of its ancient structures. Having worked as the court artist for Napoleon III, these Italian works were modest in comparison to his previous oeuvre, being prepared and finished on card, paper and panels, and being executed exclusively in pencil and watercolour. Yet, when he returned to the Netherlands, he used these sketches to paint more soaring, significant works such as this. The landscape depicted here is imaginary, yet grounded in pure observation. Knip collapses hundreds of miles and thousands of years into a single painting, depicting the coastline of Naples, with the island of Ischia and the volcano Epomeo in the background, but incorporates the ruins of buildings in Rome and rural Italy, with the remnants of the coliseum on the left and Nero’s aqueducts in the middle. It is an ode to the country in a simple square, a flattening of time and place into pure, joyous aesthetics.

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.

HENRI MATISSE

Two connected lines, filled with a simple black circle, somehow penetrate into the depth of our soul with a look of knowing, pity, and compassion. Amelie Matisse, the artists wife and the subject of this work, was a frequent muse for her partner and it is her face that adorned so many of his ideas of revolution. Here, he renders her simply, distorting her shapes and her body so that she becomes a canvas for pattern, for geometry, and for colour. As with all expressionist paintings, the work is not so concerned with depicting reality but with evoking emotional experiences. There is a reductive simplicity in the painting, almost naïve in it’s depiction that at once elevates the work into something approaching purity. Freed from the need for photo-realism or accurate representation, Matisse embraces the bias eye with which he sees his wife. He paints her in glory and elegance, she becomes an artwork to inspire as much as a woman to love.

PAOLO VERONESE

At his workshop in Venice, Veronese and a large team of apprentice artists made variation after variation of this scene. Details change, figures are added and removed and small adjustments in the compositional structure are varied. The mood too changes across the versions. Some are bright and reverent, marking the occasion as Christ fulfilling his position and starting his journey towards the kingdom of heaven, while others and darker and more ominous, as Christ gets baptised in the River Jordan he takes on, in that moment, the sins of all men shared in the water and thus condemns himself to the fate of his crucifixion. Yet for all the changes, each of which brings a new idea and dimension to the image, there is continuity too. The dove, representing the Holy Spirit, that shines powerfully above is consistent, and the poses of John and Christ, confident and trepidatious respectfully, reappear through many versions. Veronese found remarkable depth and new layers with each retelling of this scene, and in a world before reproduction, repetition brought with it revelation.

PABLO PICASSO

Emerging out of years of melancholy, in which sadness so imbued every aspect of his life that his paintings existed in shades of sombre blue, Picasso’s so-called ‘Blue Period’ finally waned into what became known as his ‘Rose Period. Here, the paintings were characterised by roses and pinks, with subject matters of joy and playfulness and a pervading sense of optimism that shone through the canvas. When this work was painted, Picasso was, for the first time, financially well-off and he felt settled in his life, with a new relationship and a residence in Spain. It was perhaps his stability in his present, that made him begin to look so explicitly backwards. The titular girl of this work is posed as the ancient goddess Venus, arranging her hair, while the boy holding the water jug is directly in reference to classical Greek statues. There is the African influences that defines so much of his work in the woman’s face, but much of the painting’s power comes in how familiar it is, as if the scene exists in the western psyche, portrayed in various guises across thousands of years.

GEORGES MATTHIEU

One must create fast. This was a tenet that Georges Matthieu stood by, believing in the primacy of speed to avoid any interference from the conscious mind. He worked with the goal to remove the context of existence, the knowledge gained and ideas informed by a life lived within a system from artworks. Nothing in the process of creation should be premeditated, no shapes should be painted that can be conceived of in memory nor should any visuals within the work have pre-existing references and ultimately, the artist must find a way to create in total, ecstatic isolation. If one could follow these principles, they could participate in the movement that Matthieu created known as lyrical abstraction and, in doing so, participate in the final transition away from a style of art that has been fermenting since the ancient times. Every movement, Matthieu believed, was simply an extension or interpolation of that ancient art of our ancestors, and it was only by breaking free from this context that we as a society could begin to think anew.

HENRI ROUSSEAU

Ten years on from the death of his first wife, Henri Rousseau married again. He painted this double portrait in the same year, in the style he had developed known as ‘portrait-landscapes’, to commemorate the occasion of this second union to Josephine Noury. She too had been widowed, and they both came into the relationship with the baggage of lost love. Above their heads, floating over as ghostly custodians, are the portraits of their past spouses painted in loving homage and gentle respect. Rousseau was considered a naïve painter, not trained in image making and, when he began, ignorant of the styles of the day or the masters who came before him. Yet this naivety proved to be a gift; unshackled from convention he painted freely and truthfully, developing a style distinctly of his own. Compositionally, so much of art reappropriates the established styles that have come before, yet Rousseau knew little of these and so the physical arrangement of his figures and landscapes exist in a world entirely of their own, perhaps never clearer than in this masterful work.

NIKOLAUS PFAFF

In early 1600s Europe, while Rudolph II ruled Austria, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Emperor, the height of sophistication was the Kunstkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities. These were decadent cabinets intended to be filled with objects, art works, artefacts and tokens that showed the wealth, culture and worldliness, and it was these cabinets that defined the aesthetic philosophies of the day. Nikolaus Pfaff was a court artist of Rudolph, and one of the most renowned sculptors of his day, working primarily in organic material and finding his speciality in the carving of ivory. This type of work was seen as a collaboration with the divine, where the artist elevated the beauty of life’s building blocks into artistic perfection that highlighted the genius of both creators. Pfaff’s work was mystic and spiritual, combining ideas of antiquities with mythical and folkloric detailing to create pieces of profound wonder.

JUAN GRIS

At the age of 19, Juan Gris gave up everything. He sold his possessions and moved to Paris, ingratiating himself with Apollinaire, Matisse, Braque and, a little later, Picasso. He worked as a satirical cartoonist, painting rarely but learning throughout from those who surrounded him, falling deep into the cubist world they were creating. It was not until 1911, however, after seeing Metzinger’s work ‘Tea Time’, that he found a painting practice that spoke to him. Metzinger, for Gris, had unified mathematics and art on canvas, his cubist portrait less free flowing than Braque or Picasso but rigid in its grid structure. Gris seized upon this and developed his own style that he named Analytical Cubism. The subject’s deconstruction is more rigorous and scientific, as if each element has been carefully taken apart and rearranged. His paintings alight something primal, our desire for order and straight lines, yet also express a freeness and spiritual understanding of the world. Gris was amongst the most distinctive of the cubists for this marriage between the rational and the impossible.

TINTORETTO

Mannerism emerged in direct opposition to the natural perfection of the High Renaissance. Where da Vinci, Rafael and Michelangelo were depicting the harmonious beauty of the world with astute realism, the Mannerists were exaggerating the features they deemed most beautiful to create artificial scenes. Their figures are elongated and irregularly proportioned to produce unnatural elegance. The balance and symmetry of the renaissance gave way to compositional tension and asymmetry, creating dynamic and vivid scenes. Alongside El Greco, Tintoretto stands tall amongst the Mannerists; known as ‘il Furioso’ in his native Italy, he drew with abandon and speed, his brushwork bolder than any that had come before. While he mostly depicted scenes of Venice, his religious works are some of the masterpieces of the movement. Here, Jesus is rendered in few strokes, his body long and weightless as he looks out to the sea at his disciples in a boat below an ominous sky. The colours guide us from the dark sky to the luminescent Christ and the loose, unnatural landscape creates a powerful sense of drama.

JENNY HOLZER

“We don’t need work on joy”, said Jenny Holzer. Instead, her work digs deep into the flaws of society, into the darkness of humanity and her own psyche and screams it from the rooftops, quite literally. She has used almost every medium available except, for most of her career, a paintbrush and canvas. Instead, she utilises a text based art and presents it on everything from billboards, stone plaques, posters and benches to t-shirts, race cars and postcards. Since 1980 she has been disseminating her text-based work into public spaces and public consciousness. In short phrases, she considers domestic violence, government censorship, the war on terror, gender theory, and personal intimacy. Her work is urgent, immediate, and straightforward yet, presented within public settings, it takes on an abstraction. Holzer disseminates words of confident poetry that interrupt your day and require contemplation.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

Having allowed chance and chaos to be collaborators for most of her career, pioneering color-field painting through the soak-stain technique, Frankenthaler began to wrest back some control. Shortly before painting this work, she had spent time in England working on a series of welded sculptures and contemplating large public commissions of her work. These two ideas were front of her mind when painting ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ as the large swathes of colour so synonymous with her paintings find themselves, for almost the first time, with hard edges. She used wood and tape to block the flow of paint from differing areas of the canvas, restricting the freedom that the paint had once enjoyed, and relegating its status from collator to assistant. Having long embraced a lack of control, here Frankenthaler guides the outcome more, suggesting a maturity in her relationship to her process. ‘You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it”, she said, ‘So that the whole surface looks felt and born at once”.

THOMAS HARRISON ALEXANDER

Trained as an engineer, Harrison approached nature as a scientist, searching endlessly for something new, something unseen, that revealed truth and beauty. Spending summers at a ramshackle cottage on the Brittany coast, he would race to the dunes each evening and watch the sun set over the water, observing the colours change successively with new variations and gradients appearing each night. It was not that Harrison was a lover of nature, rather he was a lover of art and admired nature only in service of art itself. He saw the scale of the earth, and the beauty in that scale, and spent his life trying to capture it in all of its poetic light and colour. Solitude is somewhat unusual in Harrison’s oeuvre, though large in scale like the others, it appears not to be of the sea in its dramatic splendour but of a lake in its quiet tranquillity. A figure stands, nude, at the end of a still rowboat while the oar balances delicately on the surface, not breaking the water tension, and catches the brightness of the moonlight. The work is both peaceful and ominous, one sentence in a lifelong love letter to the water.

BOTTICINI

Botticini, for all of his genius, is historically illusive. We have very few works confirmed to be by his hand, but many more which have since been attributed to him with some certainty, though without the necessary records to be definitive. His handiwork exists as invisible threads pulled by art historians, finding fingerprints of a master, and contemporary of Da Vinci, in works long mis-authored. Born in Florence as the impact of the Renaissance was growing, his father made and painted playing cards and trained the young Francisco in his early life, before he joined Leonardo Da Vince as an apprentice in the workshop of Del Verrocchio. Botticini’s work was unusual, graphic and compositional strange, perhaps inspired by the playing cards he grew up painting. The work, despite obvious technical signs of age, feels extraordinarily contemporary, the manipulation of planes and positioning of Jesus is almost surrealist. It is a celebratory, affecting and uncanny work of reverence and experimentation.

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.

EMIL CARLSEN

Regarded as one of the greatest painters of his day, Carlsen struggled financially throughout his career. He worked mainly in still lives, beautifully and delicately rendered in a palette of soft hues and fine brushwork, and he held many prestigious teaching posts across America. Yet, still lives were hard to sell, having fallen out of vogue in favour of portraits, nudes and landscapes. It would take the Cubists to resurrect the medium some decades after he Carlsen reached prominence, and Carlsen found himself a master of an art-form considered dead. Despite that, he persisted, sure in the importance of the medium and his creations. “The simplest and most thorough way of acquiring all the knowledge of the craft of painting and drawing”, he said, “[is] the study of inanimate objects, still life painting, the very surest road to absolute mastery over all technical difficulties.”

JAN DE BAEN

Artworks can write history in their image, defining a cultural event beyond its factual happening and representing the age through a quiet artistic bias. In the modern world, we are familiar with this idea after more than a century of photography, taken as truth, defining our understanding of the past and the present, yet we often think of paintings differently. When two brothers who had influence in Dutch parliament for many years were lynched by an angry mob in the late 1600s, it was a national story, and sketches composed by onlookers were reproduced in newspapers across the country. Jan de Baen used these sketches and accounts from attendees to construct his own version of events – trying, as was the philosophy of the Dutch Golden Age, to be as accurate as possible. Yet he still painted with his own astute eye, and the work is aesthetically beautiful not simply by accident. Decisions were made in every brushstrokes and the work was of such quality that it became enormously famous still to this day. The murder of the DeWitt Brothers is now remembered almost entirely through de Baen’s painting, and the truth of what happened on that day no longer matters – art has trumped truth to define the past.

CHARLES DEMUTH

A new world was being built, one defined by sleek lines, mass-production, factories that churned out repetitive perfection and removed the individual from the act of the creation. The shadows of skyscrapers hung heavy over the east coast, joined by the chimney stacks of manufacturing that blew white smoke into the air as if heralding the change to a modern age. While in Europe, artists were responding to this with obstruction that took the form of Cubism’s abstraction and Futurism’s dynamism, a group of American painters led by Charles Demuth developed a style known as Precisionism. Like the European movements that influenced it, it reduced the work to its simple geometric shapes but, unlike them, it did not attempt to obscure them but to celebrate the immaculate perfection of a machine-tooled world. Demuth’s intentionally obfuscating titles nod to the absurdist that seemed present but his sharp, cohesive and proud lines spoke to a pride with his American identity and laid the groundworks for Pop Art, that took celebration of American commerce to its logical extreme.

GERARD BILDERS

‘It is not my aim and object’, said Bilders, ‘to paint a cow for the cow’s sake or a tree for the tree’s, but by means of the whole – to create a beautiful and huge impression which nature sometimes creates, also with the most simple means’. As a boy, Bilders visited museums in The Hague and there got lost in the 17th century Dutch Landscape paintings, falling headfirst into the framed scenes and finding refuge in the nature that he depicted. It was the all-encompassing pastoral beauty of these works that drove him to capture the landscape in its totality, and in doing so create works of abundant calm and beauty. It was not the individual elements of the natural world that enthralled him, but the unity and wholeness of the whole scene that was essential for his work. Bilders lived in the nature he created, finding his home in represented lands until he died from tuberculosis at the age of 26.

EL GRECO

El Greco returned five times to the image of Saint Jerome, depicting him in various states and guises. Jerome was a priest, theologian, historian and translator who produced the most important Latin translation of the bible. This representation is amongst El Greco’s later of Jerome, and shows him primarily as a scholar, in sumptuous velvet garb with vividly emphasised folds, pointing at the bible with authority. Though Greco depicted him earlier as a penitent, he retains some of the same features in this painting of him as a scholar. The long white beard and gaunt features allude to his time spent in the Syrian desert, contrasted with his clothes and elevated status here. The work is about Jerome’s duality, showing his life story in but a single frame, one that captures his importance, achievements and status while making clear the hardships he has been through.