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.

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 20^th 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.

CONSTANTIN 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.