ALFRED HENRY MAURER

Fusing the composition of Cubist art with the potently affecting feeling of Expressionism, Maurer’s dual heads occupied him for much of his career but it was only in his maturity that they realised their greatest forms. This one, painted just two years before he died from suicide at 64, is haunting. The two female figures become one, though their fusion seems almost unwilling, their eyes filled with trepidation. This uneasy duality was something the artist felt both personally, and in his artistic practice. Maurer began his career painting landscapes in a far more naturalist style, but began to look internally and found within himself a more abstract feeling. “It is impossible to present an exact transcription of nature”, he said, “It is necessary for art to differ from nature. Perhaps art should be an intensification of nature; at least it should express an inherent feeling which cannot be obtained from nature except through a process of association… The artist must be free to paint his effects. Nature must not bind him.”

ARSHILE GORKY

“I don’t like that word, “finish.” When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting—I just stop working on it for a while.” These are the worlds of Arshile Gorky, one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 20th century, and perhaps an explanation for why he worked on this painting for nearly twenty years. As a child, Gorky watched his mother die of starvation, ill in health after surviving a death march during the Ottoman Turk genocide of the Armenians. Years later, having left Armenia and changed his name, Gorky found a photograph of himself and his mother taken when he was only eight years old. He laboured that image into a painting, reworking and improving, leaving it for months at a time and then returning in moments of inspiration. In this way, the painting was never finished, and so his mother remained alive, and in a sort of daily dialogue with her son. The double portrait is one of the most revered and admired in modern art, the depths of its sadness only matched by the wealth of its beauty.

JOSEPH STELLA

With boundless creativity, and a seemingly endless will to experiment, Joseph Stella felt restrained by every country he inhabited. In his native Italy, he found the shadow of the Renaissance omnipresent, even in the fledgling futurist movement he could feel its presence and its constriction on his desire for the new. His first stint in America was challenging and unenjoyable, he found the land and climate unbearable and the nation not willing to accept the beauty of its modernity. Travels around Europe and time in Paris brought him into contact with increasingly more avant-garde movements, and he absorbed the principles of Cubism, Fauvism, and the now established Futurism. He took these movement with him and returned to America, finding the country more open to his restless mind, and accepting of the radical art he made. Stella is ultimately remembered for his cityscapes, his wild and energetic paintings of New York’s architecture, but this still life is notable for how elegantly it combines tradition, simplicity, with the sharp geometry and abstraction. It captures a man between worlds, who could absorb ideas from across time and place and create something uniquely his own.