HENRI BURKHARD

Like so many American artists at the turn of the century, Henri Burkhrad had to leave his native land for Paris in order to find his painterly voice. Paris was the centre of the avant-garde, a melting pot of radical ideas, experimentation, and wild characters who encouraged each other to push the  envelope further in a single minded journey towards subjective truth. Burkhard had a by-the-numbers artistic education, attending three of the great Académies in the city and honing the traditional skills he had learnt as a young man in New York to novel effect. He returned home shortly before this work was painted, bringing with him the new way of thinking he had learnt overseas, and was quickly celebrated as a leading figure in the American modernist movement, exhibiting extensively at major galleries and museums across the country. Burkhard fell into relative obscurity later in life, and his contribution to a uniquely American painterly style is rarely discussed, but his cubist inspired still lives still retain a sense of potency today.

JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD

Derided for its frivolity, ‘The Swing’ came to represent the best and worst aspects of 18th Century French High Society. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the painting, a masterpiece of Rococo, as emblematic of the rotten core of the whole era - extravagant wealth concerning itself with eroticism and playfulness, existing in a fantasy world removed from reason, rationality and truth. Yet ‘The Swing’ has persisted as a great work for these reasons and more. An aristocratic woman is pushed on a swing, her shoe flying off her feet in exuberant ecstasy, as her lover hides in the bushes below, glimpsing up her dress with each swing. It is lewd and risqué, the two figures playing an illicit sexual game as a statue of Cupid keeps their secret. The lush garden unfolds behind them into impossibility, and the world is soaked in soft erotic light. It is as close to “let them eat cake” as a painting has ever come.

ALEXANDER CALDER

A mechanical engineer who applied the mathematics of movement to art making and created a revolution of sculpture. Alexander Calder stands alone in the history of 20th century art, with his dynamic mobiles and wire sculptures finding a remarkable balance between play and theory, at once rigorous in their creation and ideation and open to the whims of his wild experimentation. Calder’s obsession was the circus, and the movement of acrobats, performers, dancers, and animals who populated the big top. In everything he did, whether directly or indirectly, the kinetic, joyous exuberance of the circus is present, and his artworks capture the fantastical feeling of a day spent watching the show. This playfulness is clear here, in Calder’s Standing Man - a quick sketch on paper that nonetheless shows his mastery of balance in two dimensions as well as three. A naive figure emerges from abstract shapes that feel at once primal and reminiscent of a delicately made musical instrument, and in few brushstrokes Calder creates a work of happy harmony.