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.