MARTIN
Agnes Martin was defined by the labour of her process. Her early large-scale canvases were mathematical and systematic in their approach, enormous grids sketched by hand, taking months to turn into works of balanced beauty. Yet even in their completed state, the evidence of her work was clear. Night Sea, then, marked a turning point, where the underly power of her works came not from the proof of process but by a marked lightness that absorbs and overwhelms. A dialogue between control and nature, the shimmering blue and luminous gold make the visible grid system almost redundant. Martin creates lightness, an abstraction of the power of nature and renders herself and her labour redundant in the process. Night Sea marks the triumph of her grid paintings, never repeated, where the abstraction and the labour join in perfect harmony.
DALÍ
For modern art critics, it was a mere stunt to depict such a traditional subject. For the traditional, it was sacrilegious to apply such modernity to tradition. For the unskilled eye it was kitsch, lurid nonsense. Only a work by Salvador Dalí could upset all camps equally, and over time cement itself as the most important modern depiction of the crucifixion in the process. Ultimately, every critic from every side was correct – the work is radical as a piece of religious art and overtly banal for a work of surrealist, ‘Dalí’ art. Yet it combines both practices and transcends them, offering a new perspective on an ancient, well told tale. Dali captures a new perspective on Christ, utterly different from any before, and the stroke of true genius is in what it doesn’t show. We are not spoon-fed emotion from reading his expression, we see no blood, no thorns and no nails to tell us of pain. Instead, are left with a suspended body, exquisitely rendered without distraction, and a moment of contemplation. The landscape below is pastoral and simple, a boat and fisherman in Dali’s local port, yet combined with Christ above, Dali said it was the 'nucleus of the atom.. the very unity of the universe, the Christ!’
GOYA
Caged birds, a leashed magpie, three watchful cats and a child just past the threshold of consciousness. Goya’s portrait of the son of Spanish nobility is amongst the greatest painting of a child ever produced, his mastery on full display as the boy’s porcelain skin glows against the bright red of his suit, the restrained brushwork of lace creating an ethereal quality that captures the dream-like state of childhood. But as is so often the case with Goya, the real portrait exists around the subject. The kept birds are a marker of innocence, while the cats, considering their pounce, a harbinger of loss for the very things the birds represent. Magpies, across culture, are creatures of superstition and can be substitutes for the soul. A young boy has his soul under control, but it is caught between two planes, one of innocence and one of experience, and all the necessary danger that will bring.
KLEE
‘First of all,’, said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, ‘the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.’ Of course, Illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky – Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page.
CASSATT
Cassatt was in the first generation of ‘New Women’, riding the waves of early 19th century feminism to universities and freedom. The only American impressionist, she had a close, likely platonic, relationship with Degas, each fuelling, critiquing and improving the other. Yet, after 10 years with the group, she abandoned him and the movement. Cassatt was fiercely independent, across every element of her life, and she resisted the constraints of working within a group of artists. Instead, she turned her eye to the domestic, feminine scenes she saw around her. The latter years of her life were dedicated to painting scenes of mothers and daughters – dignified and quiet, without drama or politics, they are contemporary versions of renaissance compositions, Madonna and Child updated to the tribulations of contemporary motherhood.
DE KOONING
So named for the day it was completed, Easter Monday is an abstract representation of urbanity and a masterpiece of De Kooning’s gestural style. An underlayer of newsprint is all but obscured by sparring colours and forms, seemingly fighting for space on the canvas with each brushstroke evidence of an emotional reaction. It makes up a series of 10 large scale works De Kooning exhibited the spring of its creation, and of all of its counterparts it feels the most like its season. A work exploring decay and regeneration, over a literal backdrop of media and information, it captures something of spring in the city, the heat starting to rise, life re-entering in anger and dialogue that brings destruction with it.
DURAND
What should art aspire to? This was the question Durand was dealing with when he painted The Beeches. His work before had an emphasis on drama, on creating narrative scenes that were visually striking but told a compelling story within the aesthetics. A part of the Hudson River School of artists, Durand adapted as they did and the Beeches marked a departure to a new style of painting that his contemporaries would follow. He began to be more truthful to nature, to see the role of art as creating a mood, and a mood of tranquillity at that. Sublime drama and expression fell away to naturalistic representation, and the ability to get lost not in a story but in a place, a scene, and to leave it with different eyes than you arrived with.
TRAYLOR
Bill Traylor was born into slavery in rural Alabama in the mid 1950s. He spent most of life after emancipation working as a sharecropper until he moved, in 1939, to Montgomery and at the age of 85 took up a pencil and scraps of cardboard and began to document his past. Drawing on street corners and selling his wares to passers-by, over the next 3 years he produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art. Like so many outsider artists, Traylor could have remained unknown, and despite having a solo show in 1940, it was not until the late 1970s, some 30 years after his death, that his work began to receive wide attention. Today, Traylor is considered one of the most important 20th century artists in American history, and a leader in the folk art movement. Traylor’s works are unflinching in their depiction of the brutality of his life and American history, yet as works of a self-taught artist, their naivety is able to express raw emotion quite unlike more technical works. Traylor’s works are the only substantial collection of artworks created by someone born into slavery and they serve as a testament to perseverance and a poignant reflection of his country’s history.
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.
O’KEEFE
For 16 years, Georgia O’Keefe left the desert and the city behind and spent her springtimes in the Adirondacks. Immersed in solitude and nature, her works softened through long walks and quiet meditation, looking out over Lake George. Pastoral, full of life and idyllic, O’Keefe fought her own rebellion to fall in love with the landscape. More known for her paintings of the desert, of yonic flowers and floating skulls, the works at Lake George are a departure of sorts. Read as an abstract work, this painting is a masterpiece of form and colour, the undulating mountains blurring into their own reflection to become a single unified motion. The soft hues that invite us into the canvas are removed the real world she was observing. In many ways, the New York countryside was too picture-postcard for O’Keefe, so her paintings reduce it to something all the more strange, peaceful and serene, with a sense of disquiet throughout. ‘There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees’, she said, ‘sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces’.
MOTHERWELL
More than 100 paintings, each one a lament for what was lost after the Spanish Civil War. Rough, visceral black ovoid forms cover each canvas, while stark white rectangles rhythmically divide the space. They are an extended meditation on life and death, inspired in equal parts by contemporary poetry, surrealism and history. Motherwell employed the use of automatism, allowing his subconscious self to control the paint. He transmitted his emotions unfiltered onto canvas, the fury and frustration with the war and the hope he felt for life ahead dance in jagged dialogue. For Motherwell, the "Elegies" serve as a personal testament to the tragedy of war, a reminder that such profound loss should never be forgotten. Yet, beyond their specific historical context, they also function as universal symbols, exploring the eternal contrast between life and death and their intricate interplay.
HEPWORTH
‘There is an inside and outside to every form’, said Barbara Hepworth, ‘… a nut in its shell or a child in the womb’. Hepworth’s sculptures did not deal in such concrete forms - her work is organic, natural, abstract and unrecognisable - but they touch on something universal and infinite. Here, the misshaped form is cradled by the sphere, as if a child in their mother’s stomach, or the first revelation of a Russian doll. The inside of one bronze, patinaed form reveals the outside of another, creating a philosophical mobius strip of sculpture; one work must birth another, it cannot sit empty. Sphere with Inner Form blurs the lines Hepworth herself delineated between inside and outside - it becomes a dialogue between form and void, emptiness and our need to fill it.
BALTHUS
Paintings should be seen and not read about, so believed Balthus. He rejected many conventions of the art world throughout his career and only towards the very end of his long life did he begin to talk about his work in any traditional way. Yet Balthus’ work was talked about by others, both in adoration and controversy. Depicting the physical and psychological struggles of adolescence, Balthus paintings of young people are erotically charged, yet never explicit. The narrative scenes are disquieting and uncomfortable as he casts the viewer as a voyeur, yet in a classical, figurative style they are dreamlike and technically beautiful works. A loner and outsider, Balthus’ own reluctance to discuss his work increased their mythology and infamy. When the artist stays quiet, it is us who must consider the work most deeply.
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.
VAN GOGH
The irises want to escape. Escape the porcelain jug that has become their vase and escape the confines of the small canvas they live on. Painted in the final days of Van Gogh’s stay at the Saint-Rèmy asylum, it was the last of four paintings of irises Van Gogh created in his life. Two were painted during his time in the asylum and two in the year immediately before. The differences between these works are staggering. The former pair depict irises in the wild, the natural background energetic and free as the flowers rise from the earth in freedom. The latter pair are confined, placed on tables against flat backgrounds, longing to be wild but starting to wilt. Van Gogh was an iris, a wild-flower, who found rare beauty in nature, and saw the beauty of wilderness in his confinement.
EL GRECO
El Greco wasn’t telling a story. This work is not narrative, unlike so much religious art — instead, it is a moment in time, a devotional image to meditate on and consider. We see Christ in a moment of personal reflection, his gaze upwards towards God and his hands gently wrapping around the instrument of his death. We find him in the quiet; alone, a storm brewing behind him, and we join him in this contemplation. It is raw, expressive, immersive, and aching. Deeply human as we see the pain bubbling into Christs eyes yet all the while, the scene is otherworldly. Every decision El Greco made was in service of this duality, from the deep, rich colors of Christ’s dress to the fluid, organic brushstrokes that define his hands and body, Greco is not hiding his act of creation in this work. El Greco was not telling a story because he was asking us to consider a moment, to exist in a feeling and find ourselves and our meaning within it.
DING
In traditional Chinese culture, the proper appreciation of an artwork is expressed with the phrase du hua, or "to read a painting." There is a literal interpretation of this; from right to left, these artworks become visual, narrative poems, with unfolding detail telling aesthetic and plotted stories. In Qu Ding’s Summer Mountains, we can see figures, dwarfed by the scale and majesty of their landscape, moving across the work on a pilgrimage to a mountainous retreat. These figures are not obvious at a first look, they only appear when we practice the art of reading the works, exercising a skill of deep looking. And in this, the more metaphorical interpretation of du hug becomes clear; to truly read a painting is not just to see the details deeply but to see past them, through the outer appearance of the subject and into its inner essence.
DAVID
Socrates chose death over renouncing his beliefs. More than that, he used his imminent demise to teach his followers — he did not shy away or cower, he faced death calmly and it became his final lesson. In 18th Century France, at the height of the Enlightenment, he was a heroic figure for this steadfast commitment to truth and learning. A commitment never more clear then as he faces his death sentence by poison hemlock with dignity, rationality and self-control. Commissioned by a wealthy French scholar, David worked for more than 5 years on the piece, consulting hellenistic and classical historians, studying ancient Roman funerary scenes and reading obsessively to create a work that served as both an allegory for the present and an accurate depiction of the past. While Socrates embodied Enlightenment thought, only 2 years later the French Revolution began and the painting took on another meaning. To proudly die for your beliefs, to strive for truth, righteousness and the betterment of man and accept whatever fate may come from doing so — The Death of Socrates was shown publicly 4 years after its debut and became a symbol of the revolution just as it had become one of the Enlightenment before. David shows that resisting authority is a beautiful, noble thing.
RENOIR
Renoir could hardly hold a paintbrush in 1910. Rheumatoid arthritis had rendered his body feeble and the exacting brushstrokes of his youth impossible. Retreating to the French countryside he refused to give up. Instead, in his final years, he developed an entirely new artistic style fitting to the requirements of his ailing body. In his last self portraits, the canvas became a mirror to the soul of the artist, a celebration of the past and a defiant statement of life in the face of increasingly clear mortality. Renoir represented the end of an artistic journey of portraiture that started with Reubens nearly 400 years earlier. He was the last of his kind, a painter steeped in tradition, embrassing tentatively the Impressionist present he found himself in. In this self-portrait, Renoir immortalizes not just himself, but the essence of artistic endeavor—a testament to the enduring dialogue between creator and creation, between past and future, and between the mortal and the immortal.
MITCHELL
Balanced on fragile stalks, the sunflower is a pure concentration of mass and color that forces its way upwards to bloom in splendour, only to droop and wilt so visibly as to almost express the sadness of its mortality. This oddly human quality was exactly what Mitchell saw in the flowers, treating them ‘like people’ and returning to them over 40 years. The title of her works were decided after they were painted, drawing on the feelings and states she was in during their production. So, the Sunflower series are made in momnts of pride and fradility, their frenetic confident brushstrokes a mask for the delicateness of spirit. “If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it”, she explained, “and I draw it, and feel it until its death”.
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.”
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?
GIOTTO
Across the gulf of two eras, Giotto built a bridge. Out of the Byzantine tradition of flat, sharp and highly decorated art, he launched a revolution from a single building, armed with wet plaster, paint and a brush. That building was the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and over two years Giotto painted a biblical narrative in immense frescoes that would inform the future of painting. Widely considered the father of the Renaissance, it is his work in Padua that warrants the claim. Here, death, mourning and resurrection as played out in a single scene. A Byzantine influence is clear: the gold halos that adorn the figures, moments of angularity in the faces and the decorative borders that surrounds it. Yet compositionally, Giotto was doing something radically new. The overlapping figures creating a sense of depth, the rising path that balances the work in two, the open display of emotion – all of these were to become trademarks of Renaissance painting but in 1305 it was miraculous. Giotto literally added a new dimension to painting, transforming flat planes into something that could represent the three-dimensional world. But he also added the dimension of emotion, and paintings became vehicles for expression and catharsis under his legacy.
KELLY
“To hell with pictures”, said Ellsworth Kelly, for he does not paint pictures in any traditional sense of the word. Instead, Kelly’s works are imposing studies of tension, geometry and colour, so striking in their scale and vibrancy that the flat plane seems to metamorphosize into three dimensions. Kelly came back to the composition of ‘Blue White’ many times after its creation, the moment of contact between two enormous, abstracted forms became a recurring motif. Yet, on repeated viewing, the planes shift and the blue forms become the background to hard edged white shapes trying to cut their way through. Kelly did not want meaning ascribed to his work, he simply wanted them to be absorbed and, through this absorption, have the viewer question their perception.
CÉZANNE
Cézanne wanted to conquer Paris with an apple. Using the simplest of objects, he created a new vernacular of painting. If the work looks beautiful but not revolutionary today, that is because Cézanne succeeded in his mission. In fact, in this simple depiction of seven apples, so many of Cézanne’s groundbreaking ideas and techniques are on show. Multiple perspectives, geometric reduction, visible, almost emphasised, brushstrokes and a modulation of colour. Using an apple, Cézanne broke every rule available. Using an apple, Cézanne did in fact conquer Paris. “He is the father of us all”, said Picasso and Matisse, and in that sense he became the father of modernity.
MONET
While not the originator of the movement, Matisse’s poetic work of light and atmosphere gave the Impressionist’s their name. Painted in the wake of France’s emergent industrialization, Monet’s painting was a statement of individuality. When reproduction has become easy, and exact copies are the domain of machines, expression must come in the form of spontaneity and feeling. The work is not unfinished, but instead full of potential for what could be as modernity starts to infringe on the present. Thus, the hazy, rich colours, relaxed, free flowing brush strokes, and luminous palette that depict the port of Monet’s native town make no attempt at representing the real, but instead serve as a vision of utopia.
SARGENT
Not as much a portrait of girls as a portrait of childhood, Sargent’s most psychologically compelling work moves between beautiful and unnerving with each view. The four sisters are placed in their Parisian front room, ordered by age, with the youngest at the front and the oldest retreating into the shadows, a dark passageway behind her. The girls are wooden in their poses, so much so that the work has been called a still life, while the scenery, particularly the large Japanese vases, seem alive and dynamic. The work is temporal, time unfolds away from us as the children grow up and are moved away from the clarity of innocence into the dark unknowing of adolescence.
BRANCUSI
Two lovers are dissolved into a pure, single, abstract form in the first sculpture of modernism. Brancusi’s choice of a kiss to make this radical, revolutionary action was no mistake. In a fell swoop he was situating himself in pantheon of art history and making all the painted and sculpture depictions of romance that came before him seem old fashioned. Throughout the rest of his life he would come back again and again to this sculpture, creating new versions that were simpler, more formalistic than the ones before. Yet here is the first, a proto-cubist rendering that reduces the most natural of acts into art that approaches geometry. Inspired by African, Assyrian and Egyptian art, ‘The Kiss’ created a new language of Western Sculpture by subverting one of its most sustained motifs.
TURNER
For the specificity of its title, Turner’s work of ‘Canale Della Guidecca’ is full of inaccuracies, half-truths and imagination. Most of the buildings pictured are non-existent, and those that are have been moved from their locations for the sake of balance and beauty. Yet John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of his time, said ‘without one single accurate detail, the picture is the likest thing to what it is meant for – the looking out of the Guidecca landwards, at sunset – of all that I have ever seen’. Turner’s genius was that he was able to capture the essence of a place or an event, and he understood that essence was more about the feeling it provoked than anything else. You can stand at the Guidecca today, look out towards sunset, feel the calm, gentle, soft majesty wash over you and know that Turner’s painting might not have been accurate, but it was truthful.
CARAVAGGIO
It is fitting, perhaps, that all that remains of Caravaggio’s hand in this painting is the Angel Gabriel. Subject to centuries of restoration, the painting has become almost a Frankenstein’s monster of retouching, preservation and repair. Yet Gabriel, floating above the Virgin Mary in a billow of clouds, has needed little of this work. Instead, the hand of the master is evident and all the more potent for it; Gabriel seems to emerge from the paintings plane in luminosity, escaping the confines of the canvas and floating between our world and the one Caravaggio depicts. Known for using everyday people as life models for religious figures and bringing his contemporary experience into his religious paintings, Caravaggio does not deify the Virgin Mary. Instead he presents her as an almost tragic figure, prepared for the burden required but crushed by the expectation. Caravaggio brought images of the Bible down to his modern world and with his brushstrokes elevated them to something divine.