JACKSON POLLOCK

Jackson Pollock was at the height of his fame when he started to abandon the medium that had brought him there. Working with a more commercial gallery, that called for a more demanding production schedule from Pollock, he sunk deeper into alcoholism, depression and the ‘drip paintings’ that had made him seemed to represent a past he was no longer in touch with. This is one of the last substantial abstract works that Pollock made, and one of the few in his later career that still features the elements of chance creation that defined his major period. This painting can be read as a self-portrait of Pollocks interior life, as bright splashes of color, hopefully suggestions of the rainbow sit in the bottom third, increasingly obscured by a darkness that seems to overtake and move down the canvas in a chaotic dance. The rainbow has been greyed, the light are going out of the artist’s spirit and he paints in an attempt, perhaps, to communicate the internal turmoil that he cannot put into words.

LYONEL FEININGER

At the age of thirty six, already well into a successful career as a cartoonist, Lionel Feininger began to pursue a full time career as a fine artist. It did not take long for this career change to prove fruitful, his already well-learnt hand adapted well from ink to oil and even his early paintings, such as this, show a seemly effortless mastery of form, color and composition. In this circus scene located in the town of Arcueil, just south of Paris, the dual mediums are clear, painter and cartoonist work together in a dizzy blend that entices and disturbs. The background and the setting are painterly, drawing form the Seccessionists in its yellow hues and elegant architectural renderings as much as it shows a clear influence of Van Gogh in the swelling roofs of the house blocks and the swirling sky above. The figures however, grotesque and exaggerated as they march through the town, point to his past as a cartoonist. They are vaguely sinister, and their faces are rendered in minimal details, expressionists brought out by simple lines from years of training with ink drawings. Set against the more delicate, painterly background, there is a strange duality to the work that creates a subconscious discomfort that lends itself perfectly to the subject matter Feininger depicts.

STANLEY TIGERMAN

After decades of dominance, in the 1970s the architectural style of Mies van der Rohe that had held the American architect in its grips was beginning to wane. Modernism was being replaced by postmodernism, and the clean minimalism that was considered the paramount of aesthetic style was being challenged by iconoclastic ideas that uprooted the very principles the modern nation had based its visual language. Yet, as architectural schools and practices around the country were rebelling against Miesian ideals, Chicago, where van der Rohe had held the position of director of the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology was the last hold out of his pure, unadulterated philosophy. Tigerman created this photocollage of the Rohe’s famous ‘Crown Hall’ building sinking into the depths of the ocean as a sort of ultimatum to the architectural institutions. He mailed out the image to leading figures in the medium, with the option for a one way ticket on the Titanic, implicitly urging them to adapt, improve, modernise or die. The work has become a landmark of postmodernism, and a watershed moment in the history of American architecture, serving as the most implicit nail in the coffin of van der Rohe.