JUAN GRIS

The student paints his master in an act of homage, and in doing so steps out of his shadow. When Juan Gris moved to Paris at the turn of the century, he was well timed to meet Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as they were beginning to define the new language of the 20th century they were to call Cubism. Immediately infatuated with the style, and in awe of Picasso’s genius, Gris spent many years on the sidelines of this artistic scene, not as a full fledged member of the movement but instead as a disciple. This picture marked Gris’ entrance into the artistic milieu that managed to redefine the movement he had admired since it’s inception. Retaining the multiple perspectives and geometric forms of early Cubism, Gris’ portrait adds in an optical illusion effect with the crystalline structure of the geometry to create what would be coined ‘Analytical Cubism’. It is a fitting subject for a seminal work: his teacher and inspiration serves as the stepping stone to Gris’ emergence as an essential artist in his own right.

FRANCIS BACON

In 1650, Diego Velazquez was commissioned to paint a portrait of Pope Innocent X. The resulting images is one of the most famous works in art history, but was received with controversy in its day for the accuracy of, and lack of flattering to, its subjects. Almost exactly three hundred years later, Francis Bacon - the great British post-war painter - took Velazquez’s vision and distorted, corrupted, and expanded it in a series of paintings known as the ‘Papal Portraits’. Much as the original work made Velazquez his name, Bacon is still remembered perhaps most strongly for these works. The artist never worked from life, instead drawing from photographs, found images, and visions in his mind, often with all three in combination. The resultant works are journeys into darkness, nightmarish visions where Innocent X becomes a prisoner in a glass box, tormented by brushstrokes and carcasses, his mouth open as he screams in silence. It is unclear if Bacon’s Pope is the butcher of the beef behind him, or an equal with it just waiting to be killed but the painting grapples with a complex relationship to religion, and an upturning of the art historical order.

WINSLOW HOMER

Spending a year in a small fishing village on the English coast, the through and through New Englander Winslow Homer’s life changed. He had spent decades making a living as an illustrator, and was moving into painting with moderate success. His subjects were society folks, historical vignettes and scenes of pastoral, rural idyl that spoke to a nostalgic view of America. A naturally gifted painted, and almost entirely self-taught, the work is moving, delicate, and beautifully rendered though at times emotionally shallow. His time spent in England changed his understanding of the purpose of painting, as he saw the quiet, everyday heroism of working people. For the rest of his life, after that year, he rarely painted anything else. His theme became the eternal battle between man and nature, and he depicted with respect and revelry those who fought small battles for sustenance every day. Here, two men, precarious in their small boat against a rolling sea, pull in herring from a net. Winslow’s use of scale is remarkable - the figures absorb the eye, looming large against the horizon as if by their sheer heft they conquered nature. Yet the boat is small, and their actions, though painted in drama, are mundane and ordinary. Homer elevated daily life into something profound, and found the heroism in the overlooked.

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.

FREDERIC REMINGTON

Less concerned with history than with mythology, Frederic Remington created a persona around himself that matched the vision of America that he created with his inks, oils and watercolors. An illustrator of the ‘Old West’ who became lauded on the East Coast for his portraits of cowboys, native Americans, ranchers, military men and great battles on horseback, his work sits somewhere between historical record and fantastical storytelling. The work is narrative and dramatic, capturing moments of action with dynamic composition and modern aesthetics, and Remington spent time in the landscapes he painted enough to capture a truthful accuracy to the color, light and natural forms. Yet this technical accuracy did not translate into a historical one, and Remington’s vision of America was just that: a vision. It was, however, strong enough to ingrain his ideas into the popular imagination such that the common understanding of the ‘Old West’ is in part the creation of a wealthy New Englander, educated at Yale, and hired by Harper’s to create illustrations that would excite and enthral their readers. 

PAUL KLEE

In music theory, “Polyphony” refers to the combination of multiple tones or melodies to create a textural sound. Paul Klee was a trained and talented violinist, as well as a radical visual artist of the Bauhaus, and he took his understanding of music theory into the visual realm to create an aesthetic idea of polyphony in painting. The concept needs little explanation that is not provided by Klee’s work itself, and his idea that music was key in creating new, abstract art runs through every element of his painting. Here, in ‘Sunset’, we can see a remarkable visual harmony formed through separate aesthetic, painterly melodies. Abstract, geometric forms, tenderly painted but not altogether gentle in their rigorous shapes, take up the bulk of the compositional weight, set against an ebbing background of soft hues that reveal the artists hand. Above these, fit into the forms, is an intricate pattern of dots that bring a pace, and frenetic energy to the work, while a bright, single colour red sun sits at the base, a small arrow indicating its direction of travel. The work has a natural rhythm to it, each element works in harmony with the next, while retaining an individual visual feeling. Klee creates an orchestra of forms, techniques and colors and conducts them towards a piece of modernist beauty.

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER

Bruegel takes a small parable from the Gospel of Matthew, no more than two lines in most translations, and turns it into a painting that serves as aesthetic masterpiece, political allegory, and medical record. Six blind men follow in a diagonal line, holding onto each other by hand and stick. They walk, accurately, with their heads facing up, relying on other senses to orientate themselves. Each of them has a different affliction that has lost them their sight, ranging from corneal leukoma to a removal of the eyes themselves, and Bruegel paints these conditions with such accuracy that modern doctors can diagnose each figure with ease. The biological accuracy of the figures is but one small element of this painting’s majesty - compositional Bruegel pulls off a masterful trick. Dividing the scene into nine equal parts, where visual and informational conflict exists throughout and angling the entire movement downwards to disorientate us, the result is that when we look at the image, it is very hard to dwell on a single element. We become the blind man being led, our vision blurs and moves the longer we engage with the work until, like the figure leading the pack, we fall into its corners and cannot escape.

EDVARD MUNCH

Surreal manifestations of modern anxieties, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch used individual vignettes to speak to universal themes of loneliness, despair, and pain. Yet while his work has consistency in its emotional potency, his variation of style is enormous. This delicate, romantic image of girl, standing at the billowing curtains of a window in her flowing night dress as the light illuminates squares of darkness was painted in the same year as his more famous ‘The Scream’. While the latter work has become one of the most famous pieces of modern art, acclaimed for bold brushstrokes and radical composition that was inspired by his visits to mainland Europe and interactions with the impressionists and symbolistS, ‘The Girl by the Window’ speaks more to his native Scandinavia. Both in its romantic subject and its aesthetic style, it is a work firmly in the tradition of Northern Europe and yet for all of its simple, innocent beauty, there is the Munchian sense of disquiet across the canvas. We become voyeurs, peering in on our unknowing subject in the small of the night, watching a private moment of worry or despair as she contemplates, unaware of our presence.

PHILIP GUSTON

This remarkable double portrait of Guston and his wife Musa, who died the year this work was completed, shows the artist at his most vulnerable, personal, and revealing. Curled in the foetus position, his limbs emerging from crumpled covers, he holds with equal strength the two things that have kept him together in his turbulent life, love and art. The couples faces are pushed together in a kiss as they lie on the pillow, their forms merging together into a single, abstract block of flesh like a naive Klimpt. As the child of Jewish refugees in Canada, who witnessed the suicide of his father and death of his brother before he was 18, Guston began as an abstract expressionist until he moved into large scale, almost cartoonist works that addressed the contemporary injustices of the world and worked through his past trauma. Painted towards the end of his own life as well as his wife’s, the work is both ode and penance - after decades of strife and trouble, of personal trauma, financial hardship, ill health and plunges into darkness through his art and his mind, it is touching if not surprising that at the end of his career, Guston moves to the most simple and relatable imagery of his career. Gone are illusions to the Holocaust and the Klu Klax Klan, to violence and disharmony that featured in so much of his most celebrated work and instead, the artist becomes a child again, clinging on for dear life to to his dual salvation.

ELLSWORTH KELLY

In an age of modernity, where religion’s powers are waning and art was moving away from the representative, Ellsworthy Kelly wondered what would become of the altar-piece. Spending nearly a decade in Europe in the late 40s and early 1950s, he spent time in classical churches and cathedrals and became infatuated with the large scale, multi-panel works that served as their centre-pieces. On his return to America, he tried to incorporate this idea of art works composed of separate pieces, each serving as stand-alone painting but contributing ultimately to something greater than the sum of their parts. This seven panel work was the answer to his wondering, arranging the colours through chance techniques, he removed himself from the aesthetic decision making of the work and instead let the beauty of the artwork live in the intersections of its medium. The dialogue happens at the edges of the panels, where block colours interact across flat planes, and like the religious altarpieces that inspired it, the work tells a story of humanity and emotion when seen in its totality.

FERNAND LÉGER

Informed and inspired by the fledgling Cubism of Picasso and Braque, Léger imbued the movement with a joyousness expressed in curvature and color. He saw machines and industrialisation as subjects just as important as people in his work, and the optimism he felt for the modern age is clear in every brushstroke. This was a study for a larger piece named ‘The Level Crossing’, and the scaffolding, tubular pipes, and signposts depicted take on an almost photo-pop art quality as the industrial workings of a train yard are transformed into a wonderland of bright shapes and shifting perspectives. Trains long represented the beginning of a new age, and in this study for what Léger would consider a portrait of sorts, he elevates the elder statesman of modernity into a beacon of hope for the future, and a triumph of the contemporary age. 

JOHN CONSTABLE

Born in a small village in Suffolk, on the east coast of England where marshy land and rivers cut through a gently ebbing, pastoral countryside, the painter John Constable never strayed far from his home. So affectionate was he to his native landscape, that even today the area around his village is known as ‘Constable Country’. Yet his ties to his home were, at least to his contemporaries understandings, detrimental to his career as they led him to reject opportunities that would move him elsewhere. History has proved Constable right for his decisions to stay close; the works he painted of verdant fields, glistening rivers, and aching trees revolutionised landscape painting with a return to composition from nature, rather than the imagination. Constable painted this view of Stoke-By-Nayland, the neighbouring village to the one he was born in, many times throughout his life. Almost always from the same angle, with the same trees in the foreground and the same church behind, a church he had painted the altarpiece for as a young man, that they serve as a biographical record of his life. It was a dedication and love for his homeland that led him to such repetition - “I should paint my own places best”, he said, “painting is but another word for feeling”.

GEORGIA O’KEEFE

On her first visit to New Mexico in 1929, Georgia O’Keefe would take long walks in the nighttime desert, and encounter mysterious crosses dotted throughout the landscape. Simple, folk objects; they became to her these strange spectres of religion in a land of arid nature, that they took on the form of a ‘thin dark veil of the Catholic Church’. These crosses were most likely placed by a Catholic lay brotherhood known as the Penitentes, marking the routes to their informal church like structures called moradas. Yet for O’Keefe, they became something else entirely. “Painting the crosses”, she said, “was a way of painting the country”, and this is evident in their composition. Reducing these already simple objects to their most formal elements of shape and color, and magnifying them from there, she sets the cross against the surreal New Mexico background, its crossarm almost enforcing the horizon behind it. O’Keefe would settle in New Mexico some 16 years after this first visit, and become amongst its most celebrated and famous daughters, but it was these early cross paintings that established her relationship with the state and her as a leading American modernist. 

DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

The flesh of Christ is so alive, so exquisitely rendered in oil such that we can almost see the pores of his skin, as to cause devotion and reverence at the sheer sight of it. This was the intended effect. Velazquez was painting at the time of the Catholic Reformation where an enormous emphasis was placed on Transubstantiation and thus the body of Christ was seen as a symbol of rebellious Catholicism in the face of the rising Protestantism. Hired as a court painter of the Spanish King Phillip IV, who tolerated a slow pace of work because he saw that he was a once-in-a-generation genius, Velazquez moved more towards religious imagery and away from the historical work and portraiture that had made his name. The paintings made under this patronage are amongst his most famous and significant, using his immense technical skill and a deep understanding of the transformational power of art to create stirring works of holy ordinance that elevate history and allegory into something tangible.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

As a child, Brancusi was told folk tales of a beneficent, dazzlingly plumed golden bird. The Maiastra is a character in the Romanian folklore and the descriptions he heard from stories told by matriarchs flew around his mind as a child. As he begun to understand his calling as an artist in his teenage, his preoccupation with the image of this bird as a formal object, plastic and changeable, began. Brancusi made more than 30 variations of this theme, the most minute adjustments radically changing the sculpture’s weight and feeling within space. The plumage is simplified into medium, polished bronze that catches the light and seems to take flight, and the bird is reduced to it’s constituents parts, delicate in its balance on a small base but imposing in its power. This example is amongst the most minimal, simplified down to a single form with no adornment and little suggestion of subject yet, if you know what you are looking for, the bird takes flight and elegance. Brancusi’s genius was in the finding of an essence, removing the pomp and ornament of people, objects, and beings and distilling them into something approaching pure truth. His bird is a platonic ideal, universally recognisable and yet open to the possibility of immense and infinite variation.

JASPER JOHNS

In order to create something new, Johns had to destroy all that he made before. An abstract expressionist up until the mid 1950s, Jasper Johns looked for a way to move beyond the movement and found it in simple, recurring motifs, but before he progressed with the new artistic career that would make his name, he destroyed all the canvases that he had produced before. The target was the perfect image for an artist looking for explicit meaning. Instantly recognisable, pre-existing, simple in it’s formation but open in its interpretation, from 1955 to 1961, John produced dozens of paintings and drawings featuring the target. There is something quintessentially American about John’s targets, tapping into a primary color Pop feeling that below it’s light joyousness perhaps hides something sinister. Too, for all of his attempt to abandon the Abstract Expressionist movement he had worked in, its influence is visible in the brushstrokes and the unusual application of encaustic, a hot wax mixed with pigment, that make up the image, hiding visual depth and the proof of a human hand in each stroke.

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

Amongst the most reproduced works of art in all of history, it is easy in the face of such abundance to forget the sheer revolutionary importance of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The first in series of thirty six views of Mount Fuji that Hokusai produced, and printed in an edition of roughly 100 from the original woodblock, the work gained immediate praise in his native Japan and shortly after in Europe, where it inspired the Impressionist movement. The print, as with others in the series, used the color Prussian Blue for the first time in Japanese print art, bringing a boldness to the medium that had not been seen before. Too, it combined traditional Japanese printing techniques with a European graphical perspective, synthesising the two continents disparate styles into a single work that could speak loudly across cultures. These two novel changes marked a shift in art history and a movement not to a homogenised global style but certainly towards a common language.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

“I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”, said Robert Rauschenberg. He is describing his ‘Combine Paintings’, of which Untitled is amongst the very earliest, that marked a major shift not just in the Abstract Expressionist that was the dominant movement of the day, but in the course of American Art. They bridged a gap between Abstract Expressionism and the soon emergent Pop Art, combining found imagery and pop culture objects with a saturation of thick, impasto paintwork and an openness to chance operations and randomness that allows for perceptual shifts in the work. As Rauschenberg developed this style of art-marking further, the images became more refined, clearer in their messages and ideologies. Yet here we see the beginnings of change, the first step towards a flattening of mediums where painting and sculpture became not separate practices but something combined.

HENRY MATTSON

In Woodstock, New York, Henry Mattson could starve more slowly and more comfortably than he could in the city. This was his own admission and resignation, that life as an artist would not bring wealth or comfort but was worthwhile nonetheless, and he could live in Woodstock for pennies on the Manhattan dollar enough to pursue the only thing he ever wanted to do. Born in Sweden, he arrived in America at the turn of the century with thirteen dollars in his pocket. He picked up irregular work at machine shops, harvester companies, and landscaping firms while taking art classes in the evenings and painting as a hobby. He was encouraged by his mentor to give up painting and find a trade, advice Mattson followed for a little while until he found it impossible to continue to deny his truest desire. So to Woodstock he went, subsidising his painting with odd jobs until, through perseverance and talent, he became nationally renowned and a hero of the artists movements of upstate New York. He was, in so many ways, an archetype of the American dream, and of the northern dreamer of folk tradition who believed in beauty so much that he risked it all, and won.

CARAVAGGIO

Removed from context or adornment, the viewer becomes part of an intimate exchange. There are few clues as to time or place, the garb is simple, peasant robes, the background is dark and anonymous and the lighting so artificial as to almost seem more real than reality itself. This was the genius of Caravaggio, in this, one of the most important works of the Baroque: an ability to, as he so often did, take religious stories out of antiquity and bring them fiercely into the contemporary world that even five hundred years later they feel modern. Jesus is bathed in light that makes him emerge from the oil and seem almost real as his disciples gather round. Thomas, who had doubted his faith and Christ’s return, proves his finger into the open wound in Christ’s side. It is a tangible display of flesh, and confirmation that the son of God is both man and divine. Yet, this proof materialises in the medium of the painting as well of the subject. Christ as an eternal figure, always relevant, always human, is exemplified in the rich chiaroscuro of Caravaggios brushstrokes - as Thomas’s doubting was allayed by direct contact with flesh, so too is ours by being allowed entry into this scene that feels so tangible.

ANDRIAEN VAN DE VENNE

Commercially viable but laden with political and religious allegories, the work of van de Vedde achieved him enormous success and fame in his lifetime, becoming a popular illustrator of the current day. This work, one of a series depicting the changing seasons, is exemplary of his style, full as it is with wry wit, shrewd observations and a genuine, aesthetic beauty. Revellers skate across a frozen lake at the height of winter, wearing ornamental garb that shows their wealth. To their left, an old, peasant women and her two young children stand with a look of worry across their faces, on the precipice of the land and water. It is a painting of two halves, a sign of the differences in culture explained through the mediums of the earth. On the bank, there is poverty and crudeness; a man defecates by a tree while a dog does the same infant of him, a figure looks perversely at the revealed bottom of a fallen woman and the trees are bear and sad. The colours are muted browns and greys that speak to a sadness of the winter period. Yet, on the right hand sign, a winter sun shines and wealth abounds in fanciful dress, playful movement and bright colours. Van de Vedde creates a work of truthful duality, a portrait of a nation in winter time, divided by inhabiting the same space. 

JOSEPH BEUYS

An elusive guru of modern art with mysterious and dark origins - the life of Beuys was an extension of his performance art. As teenage volunteer for the Nazi air force known as the Luftwaffe, he began to consider life as an artist. Later on, Beuys would often tell the story of his body being salvaged from the wreckage of his crashed plane by the indigenous people of Crimea and nursed back to health wrapped in fat and animal skins. The plane crash happened but no other part of the story was true - instead it was a way to bridge a gap between his fascist, violent beginnings and the deeply humanist, emotional, shamanistic artist he became. He crated a charismatic, messianic persona that was deeply spiritual, and proclaimed far and wide the healing power of art in a world that was wounded. “Our vision of the world", he said, “must be extended to encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact.” This work, ‘The Shaman’, is a self portrait - an animalistic form appears in the centre and above it, the disembodied hat-wearing head of Beuys, all rendered in a thick, almost blood-like red. It is the portrait of a spiritual man, not unfamiliar with the darkness of violence.

CHARLES BIEDERMAN

Ideologically absolute and socially difficult, Charles Biederman rose through the ranks of American artistic society quickly. He gained recognition for technical skill and conceptual ideation but with it, a reputation for being difficult to work with. He dropped out of school, fell out with curators and gallerists, abandoned artists and influences in a strong-headed search for artistic truth. In 1936, he was being touted as one of the key players of American Modern Art but by 1937 he had all but abandoned the style that had brought his acclaim. The painting here, full of loose, naturalistic forms and anthropomorphised shaped would later be rejected by Biederman and replaced with strict geometry. There was, he thought, an incompatibility with the modern world of mathematical rigour and the depiction of biological shapes, a so called ‘conflict of forms’ of which he fell on the geometric side. Not long after, Biederman would reject painting altogether, instead working in three dimensional reliefs and mixed media collages to communicate his ideas of the modern world. Biederman was restless and cocksure, paying little attention to social convention or norms in pursuit of greatness. He found it.

ANDY WARHOL

Before he was Andy Warhol, Andrew Warhola was making a living as a commercial illustrator in 1950’s New York. He drew shoes for magazines and manufacturers, designed book covers for pulp novels and record covers for weekly hits and, in the role that allowed him the most bounds for experimentation, he created greeting and holiday cards for Tiffany and Co, as well as the MOMA. It is unsurprising, to know Warhol as we do today, that he always loved Christmas. He was a devout man, and charitable throughout his life, but something of the kitsch, Americana of contemporary Christmas festivities spoke to him and the designs he made for Christmas cards become his most popular. Using a unique technique of blotting ink and then tracing hard outlines on a new sheet of paper lowered atop the original, Warhol’s distinctive style of the day lent itself to festivities. His illustrations are warm and playful, full of character while retaining a remarkable simplicity in their style. It was not long before his genius was noticed, and he dropped the ‘a’ of his last name to become the artist we know today, but in these early, commercial works, we can see so many of the technical and contextual components that led to his maturity.

FEDERICO CASTELLÓN

A self-taught artist and young prodigy, Catellón moved from his native Spain to Brooklyn, New York with his family at the age of seven. He was, even at this age, a gifted draughtsman and sketched relentlessly, and he spent his childhood taking advantage of the new city he lived in by visiting museums and exhibitions constantly. By the time he was a teenager, Castellón’s inspirations ranged from the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the burgeoning, contemporary Surrealist scene he had witnessed at small galleries. Before he had even graduated high school, he had caught the attention of Diego Rivera, who by this point was internationally acclaimed with public murals across the country. It was with Rivera’s help that Catellón travelled across Europe in his early twenties, taking in the emerging avant-garde and, on his return to New York, laid his claim as the very first American Surrealist. His etchings and sketches circulated the country and contributed to the rise of one of the most consequential movements of the century.

ANDREAS FEININGER

Feininger was not interested in people. A pioneer of modern photography, both as an artist, a writer, and an educator, almost none of his thousands of images are of humans. Instead, he captured cities, skylines, and the natural world. To look at his images is to see a flattening between these two seemingly exclusive realms. Close up, almost abstract images of shells, bones, plants and minerals seem to speak the same language as his moody, atmospheric, and often revealing images of Manhattan or, as this image is from, Stockholm. Training first as an architect, he worked at the Bauhaus where his neighbour was Moholy-Nagy, one of the founding fathers of the modern photograph. He took up the camera and never looked back, yet his architectural training is evident in everything. This abstraction of the Stockholm ground looks like a work of urban planning run wild, as much as it does some unknowable natural form. Feininger saw buildings, cities, and modernity as something not against the natural world but altogether in dialogue with it.

REMBRANDT

A great Babylonian king named Nebuchadnezzar looted the Temple of Jerusalem and took the holy artefacts as his own. Hist son, Belshazzar, hosts a feast and uses the golden cups from the temple as receptacles for wine and merriment until the hand of God appears and inscribes in the wall in an cryptic script. While in the Old Testament text, the script is suggested to be Aramaic, here Rembrandt uses Hebrew. At the time of this painting, he was living in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam and took the text from the book of a close friend and Rabbi of his. But Rembrandt alters it, rearranging the characters into columns and incorrectly transcribing a letter to retain a sense of illegibility to the message. As the story goes, Belshazzar and his party of party of high society Babylonians could not decipher God’s message and had to call upon Daniel to help. The message, both in the bible story and in Rembrandt’s description reads: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians”.

ED RUSCHA

Random phrases become mantras, and simplicity becomes confusing. This is at the heart of Ed Ruscha’s genius: an ability to use typography and paint to elevate words into something considerable. Heavy Industry is inherently vague; painted on a used canvas rotated ninety degrees, where the ghosts of previous words are scarcely visible through thick brown paint, it provides no answers, and asks no direct questions and yet leaves the viewer with an unshakeable sense that something is being said. The industry in question is not explicit, it’s weight is up to us to decide and so Ruscha is able to use the vernacular and tactics of advertising to, by removing the context, force us to focus on linguistics and meaning in a way that explicit commercialism is not able to. Ruscha changed his typeface to suit the words, and here, in heavy, almost gothic, serifed font, the painting seems to inhabit the very phrase it proclaims - every element speaks to ‘Heavy Industry’, while leaving it entirely up to us to decide what that means.