ROBERT BRACKMAN

Regarded in his time as a master of portraiture and one of the finest art teachers in the country, Robert Brackman was a quintessential working artist. Technically gifted, good natured, and able to render not just the physical attributes of subjects but capture something of their essence, he was well liked and regarded within the artistic community and beyond, painting portraits of notable figures from John Rockefeller to Charles Lindbergh, receiving commissions from the State Department and the military, and creating large scale paintings for the burgeoning Hollywood film industry. Yet for all his skill, Brackman lacked a clear and cohesive point of view in his art that would have allowed him to make a name outside the circle of contemporaries and clients he found himself in. Expertly and elegantly combining classicism with the more academic painting styles of the day, his work is exquisitely composed and dedicated rendered, covering not just portraiture but still life and landscape as well. Yet it pushes few boundaries, and instead feels concerned with aesthetics above all else; Brackman’s training and skill removed novelty from his work which was, in many ways, his downfall.

EDOUARD VUILLARD

An artwork about looking at art, and encouraging us to value that experience. Painted from a low vantage point, Vuillard puts us directly in the gallery and at eye level with the other patrons. The painting is unusually matte, thanks to a specially formulated distemper and an unvarnished canvas. All of this contributes to a sense of accessibility, removing the museum from he pedestal and instead inviting us in to a place that feels welcoming and un-intimidating. Painted in the wake of the First World War, the work serves as an ode to museums, to the importance of and necessity for a space to engage with the past so as to remind us of our humanity. One of four works painted of Vuillard’s favourite galleries at The Louvre in Paris, each in its own way speaks to the simple, revolutionary act of looking at art, and the importance of preservation and engagement in a time of destruction.

FRANK STELLA

"After all the aim of art is to create space”, said Frank Stella, “Space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live" In the 1970s, Stella’s work was becoming, almost accidentally, more baroque, extravagant and figurative than the minimalist work he had begun with. In the light of these newfound flourishes, Stella returned to the simplest format, centering himself in the simplicity which encapsulated his philosophy. "The concentric square format is about as neutral and as simple as you can get," he said. "It's just a powerful pictorial image. It's so good that you can use it, abuse it, and even work against it to the point of ignoring it. It has a strength that's almost indestructible - at least for me.” When he was making work that was trying to say too much, it was a return to the indestructible simple that helped him rediscover his purpose.

LÉON BONNAT

A Frenchman with Spanish influences who stripped away surface beauty to find the pain, humanity, and truth in his subjects, Léon Bonnet was revered by his contemporaries but existed in an uncomfortable middle ground between movements that stagnated his wider acclaim. Bonnat had the technical ability of the academic painters who were in vogue in late 19th century Paris, yet he emphasised feeling and overall effect rather than high attention to detail much like the impressionists who were making waves and breaking boundaries. As a result, he never quite fit into either group, and gallerists and collectors struggled to place his work. He made his living painting portraits of celebrities of the day, though both contemporary and modern critics agreed that his genius was most readily found in his religious paintings. ‘Christ on the Cross’ is one of the most known and loved crucifixion paintings of the western world. Rendering Christ with exacting brushstrokes, allowing the brutality of crucifixion and the pain of his humanness to wash over the viewer, it both allows the viewer compassion and insight, while retaining respect and glory for Christ himself.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot had only just begun living together when he painted this portrait of her. Some eighteen years his junior, she had been a seamstress who modelled for the great painter before their romance began, and though he named this painting after the house plant she looks at, we can understand it as a declaration of domestic bliss. With jewel like colors and loose, fluid brushwork, it is the work of a painter totally at ease, both of his mastery of the medium and of his life in general. Charigot’s dress falls provocatively off her shoulder, yet the painting is not erotically charged, instead it is quiet, gentle, and content. The room is imperfect, with flowers laid down atop a credenza awaiting their vase and the table unkept - it is wholly lived in, and comfortable. Charigot is depicted unaware, gazing off to admire the flora ahead of her, we are given a glimpse into the interior life of the couple, our presence unnoticed, or at least unacknowledged. 

HEDDA STERNE

The painting moves between figuration and abstraction with each look as if playing a trick on the eyes. In the lower half, the unmistakeable form of the Brooklyn Bridge comes in and out of focus, the lattice ironwork contorts in impossible, Escher-esque movement, and out of rigid design comes a breathing, living thing that confronts the viewer. The upper half of the painting has less to hold on to, a grey haze covers faint geometry that suggests a skyline rising behind the bridge. Hedda Sterne was a leading Abstract Expressionist, one of the few women in a male-dominated movement, and evident here is her mastery and subversion of the style. Rather than seeking pure emotion through form, she allows figuration to take on the feeling of the unconscious - the oppression and beauty of dense urbanity exists in the interior and exterior lives of all city dwellers and the duality is potently clear here. The work too exists across times, an homage to cityscapes and landscapes before her, and a declaration of a bold, intimidating future that is less readable than ever.

DEBORAH WILLIAMS REMINGTON

Born to a storied American family and descended from Frederic Remington who’s genre paintings helped define the public imagination of the wild west, Deborah Williams Remington played a quiet part in her own revolution. As a member of the burgeoning San Franciscan beat scene in the early 1950s, she was part of a group of six artists who opened the ‘Six Gallery’. In 1955 they hosted Allen Ginsberg for his first ever poetry reading, performing an early version of ‘Howl’ to small crowd. Remington was the only woman in the small group of organisers, and the event she had planned kicked off the Beat Movement across America, but quickly wrote her out of the story. Leaving the machismo of 50s literary San Francisco, she travelled across Asia, learning traditional calligraphy in Japan and absorbing color theory in India. She settled in New York on her return and became a leading ‘hard edge’ abstract painter, rebelling against the painterly forms of the abstract expressionists and instead finding beauty in rigid, almost mechanical formulations. The composition of her pieces is at once confrontational and gentle, speaking to a life of fighting against, of finding her own path, pushing up against darkness and answering with beauty and light.

HENRI MATISSE

After a lifetime of painting, Matisse would abandon the medium in his final decade to work with paper cutouts. These, he felt, could bring his philosophy and fascination with form and motif to their most simple, elegant conclusion. This painting of his favourite model, Lydia Delectorskaya who would become his studio manager, muse, and caregiver, is one of the last he did before this transition. It encapsulates so much of his decades long career, hitting all of the notes of his greatest hits as if he was aware that it would serve, in parts, as a goodbye to the medium that had served him so well. The very floor that Lydia sits upon is akin to the paper cut-outs that would follow; sharp, rigid, geometry frames the loose, natural figure of her human form while the lines and colors move from bright and thin to dark and bold. It is a work of juxtapositions, sharp edges meeting soft curves, deep blacks in symphony with soft pinks, and, in a knowing nod, the subject is surrounded by earlier Matisse works still resting on their canvases. It is, in this way, not so much a portrait of Lydia as it is of Matisse’s studio, a way to capture his lifestyle before he changed it again, as he did so many times in his wild and storied career.

ANTON MAUVE

Artists strive to capture different things. Form, color, emotion, the impression of a place - each new movement that comes searches for something different, places importance on elements hereto under explored. A group of Dutch painters in the late 19th century, known as the Hague school, were concerned above all with the mood of a scene. Accuracy, feeling, form, these were secondary characteristics in their mind. Unlike the impressionists, working at a similar time, who wanted to capture the impression of a place, in loose feeling and memory hazed depiction, the Hague School wanted to explore the pervading emotion not of the painter but of the environment in totality. Here, Anton Mauve, the de-facto leader of the group, captures a sombreness, a moody atmosphere heavy with the morose, not defeatist but quiet and weary. He creates poetry with his shades of grey that seem to hang over every element of the scene. It is not so much a portrait of a landscape, and a portrait of the weight that sits heavy on us all.

MORRIS LOUIS

Paintings in motion, concerned with themselves. Morris Louis was working in the time of abstract expressionism and was himself a leading figure in the movement of ‘color-field’ painting, making bold, gestural works that were as much about the process of their creation as anything else. Using the newly developed acrylic paints and watering them down into a fluid, viscose liquid, he would pour the mixtures from the top of the canvas and allow them to create a waterfall of colour as gravity pulled them to the bottom. Louis did not prime his canvases, meaning the raw fabric would entirely absorb the paints on its surface, staining and penetrating until the paint and the canvas unified into a single entity. This work is from his ‘Veil’ series, and while at first glance it looks like a work of darkness, with a single, organic block of blackness consuming the majority of the square, it reveals a world of process on closer inspection. At the top of the canvas you can see the huge variety of colours that were poured down, and how with each new color added it combined into a dark monolith with none of the vividness that was possible when it existed individually. 

ANDREA DI BARTOLO

In brilliance and brightness, the tragedy and drama of the crucifixion is played out. The technicolor masses that gather below the cross exist in vignettes of action - Mary collapses and is looked after by saintly figures, three wise men gather below Christ to confer, guards gamble in the foreground for the punished’s belonging, and a watchmen breaks the leg of the crucified man to Christ’s left. The moral theatre is rendered in unusually joyful color such that each figure seems like a gemstone, bringing the weight of the picture to the base and leaving the top half adrift in rich gold. The Bartolo family of which Andrea was a part had a long lineage as artists and craftspeople, and the ornate decoration of gold backgrounds had become a calling card for the lineage. The haloes of Christ and the angels around him are punched with delicate geometric patterns into the wood itself, and the gold background has a border of subtly decorated relief running its length. While the bright colors of below may immediately draw the eye, it is Christ, the gold sky behind him, and the angels around him who Bartolo has paid the most attention to.

THOMAS DE KEYSER

In a time before mass produced imagery, a painting served as both aesthetic form and, often, advertising. When Thomas de Keyser was commissioned by the guild of Goldsmiths, responsible for ensuring the quality of raw material and products of the cities metal workers, there were certain requirements that the portrait had to meet. It was to be hung in the guildhall, and immediately visible to all customers and members, often as a first impression. It’s purpose then was to communicate immediately and effectively the authority, professionalism, and trustworthiness of the syndics who ran the guild. Set against a black background, and with each subject staring directly at the viewer, the work is an invitation towards them, the open hand of the seated man almost ushering us further into the building. The men clasp various tools of the trade, signalling a practiced knowledge of their work, and are depicted from a slightly lowered angle to emphasise their authority. Yet for all of its utility, it remains a most beautiful work, delicately rendered and dramatically composed. Its function does not overpower, no undermine, its aesthetic value.

JEAN-BAPTISTE LE PRINCE

A whole story is told in a single frame, a narrative unfolds through clues that deepen with each further look. A woman reclines in anything but calm, her nightdress dishevelled and open to reveal her skin underneath. A dog jumps in excitement out of frame, as if excited to see a familiar face unknown to the viewer. Two cups and a cafetière sit on the table, but only one figure exists in the scene. A chair lies tipped on the ground as if knocked over in a hasty retreat. Le Prince titilates us with every element of this painting, giving us just enough information to piece together a narrative but never so much as to be confident in our version of the story. We know an interruption has occurred, though not by who. We can assume a male suitor who was not meant to be in the boudoir of the central character has recently left the scene, just as another, more familiar to her, has entered. It is intriguing and amusing in equal measure, and an extraordinary example of Boudoir Paintings that were popular at this time. Giving the viewer a glimpse behind the curtain into the private lives of women, these paintings were playful in nature but radical in their free depictions of sexuality and the lack of shame or judgement associated with it.

GEORGE TOOKER

Tooker told stories of anxiety. He became, and remains, known for paintings of claustrophobic urbanity, cubicled domestic life, and labyrinthine liminal spaces populated by the seemingly trapped city dweller. His images are often surreal, always disquieting, and filled with a profoundly modern sense of dread. Save, that is, for Meadow I. Painted in the aftermath of his mother’s death when the painter was racked with grief and loneliness, he moved his visual language out of the metropolitan and into the pastoral. The work speaks directly to Renaissance religious works, not only in the parallel he draws between himself and his mother to Joseph and Mary weeping at the crucifixion of Christ but also in the very medium itself. Using a 17th century technique of egg tempera, he painstakingly applied fast drying homemade paint over months to create a scene of misery and calm. Painting became, in this instance, a process of grieving for Tooker - a respite from his pain that existed not only in his self but in the paintings he normally produced were replaced with a meditation of rural beauty.

GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO

In 18th century Venice, the Rococo style reigned supreme. Characterised by lively figures and bright colors, the images of this movement are rich in adornment and decoration that seems indulgently joyful at every step. They adorned the walls and ceilings of churches, palazzos, and government buildings across the city, and there was no artist more associated with and celebrated for this style than Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. One of the last old masters of Italy, his work helped define the end of the Renaissance in his native city and far across Europe. His shadow was long across the art world at this time, and particularly so for his son Giovanni Domenico who followed in his footsteps, having trained first as his apprentice. The young Tiepolo worked in his father’s studio, and executed this painting after a series that that the elder Tiepolo had completed years earlier. Giovanni Domenico first turned his father’s series into etchings that were sold and disseminated across the country for financial gain, and then painted works based on the etchings of the originals, making this work a copy of a copy.

SIMON GROUVENEUR

Simon Grouveneur’s paintings are ciphers. Dense labyrinths of mythological symbolism, they are heavily encoded visual matrices of numbers, patterns, colors, and icons. Throughout his life he obsessively examined structures of philosophy, linguistics and mysticism and built a personal language and grammar of symbols, using his paintings to seek a truth and express complex ideas in aesthetic and balanced beauty. As obsessive as he was in his search for knowledge, he was more so in the process of creating the works. He created his paints by hand and spent months on each small canvas, working with an exacting and rigorous precision that left nothing to chance and no drop out of place. “Art is not to please or entertain”, he said, “art is to tell truth, not because artists are the only truth tellers but because art is the right media to tell truth.”

EVERETT LONGLEY WARNER

A leading figure of a doomed movement, Warner’s career faltered right as it was beginning what looked an astronomical rise. After years of training both in America and Europe as a young man, he established himself as a seminal figure of American impressionism at the turn of the century. The movement was by now past its prime in Europe but across the Atlantic was only beginning to rear its head. Warner was well positioned and building a significant public profile with solo and group shows, presenting work at the Worlds fair, winning awards for his paintings, and joining a Connecticut artist community that was the preeminent breeding ground for this new Impressionist movement. Yet in 1913, at the legendary Armory Show in New York, the American public were introduced to the European modernism, and the effective beginning of what we now understand as modern art. Just as soon as it entered the vogue, American Impressionism was out of date, out of touch, and undesirable in the face of this radical avant-garde. Warner continued to paint throughout his life, achieving moderate success and holding positions at important schools as a teacher, but the career that once seemed inevitable never materialised, despite his talents.

PAOLO VERONESE

At a wedding in Galilee, Jesus performs his first attributed miracle when he turns water into wine to satiate thirsty guests. The story appears only in the Gospel of John, but has long been held not only as an important proof of Jesus’ divinity, but also as a symbol of the Christian approval of marriage and acceptance of earthly celebration. Some fifteen hundred years later, in an era of Venetian indulges rife with feast and celebration, the great Mannerist, Renaissance painter Veronese brings the story into his contemporary world. Feasts such as the one depicted here were common in society, sumptuous displays of food that not were not just about presenting wealth, sophistication, and power, but literally passing on these qualities to the guests via food. Jesus sits at the centre of the table, surrounded by more than one hundred and thirty figures on all sides, dressed in extravagant garb of the day. A story of a humble miracle becomes indicative of a celebratory society, and brings the sacred into the profane, reminding viewers that the act of sharing food and drink is more than just community but communion.

GEORGES ROUAULT

Born in a Parisian cellar to a poor family, Georges Rouault rose through the ranks of France’s burgeoning avant-garde to become one of the most significant figures in Expressionism and Fauvism. At the age of 14, Rouault began an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer and his time working with heavy glass bonded by thick lead is evident in his later painting style. The thick black lines and brash energetic brushstrokes speak to both the medieval style of stained glass and the Expressionist movement that sought to capture a human emotion in both medium and content. The painting here, of a court judge, was one of 23 produced when Rouault was invited to observe proceedings in a courtroom. At the time of painting, he had become most known for paintings of Christ rendered in a similar style. He applies here the same generosity to the Judge as he does to religious figures. “If I have made of the judges lamentable figures,”, he said, “it is no doubt because I was betraying the anguish that I feel at the sight of one human being having to judge another. I would not be a judge for all the wealth and happiness in the world.”

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

A gentle joy exudes from every brushstroke. The radiance of youth and the calm of a warm summers day wash over us as Renoir’s delicate hand creates an image that seems to exist in both reality and fantasy at once. The central figure gazes absentmindedly into the distance, her face filled with contentment while her younger sister stares at us, rendered in a looser hand to look as if she has just run into the frame. This is at the heart of Renoir’s brilliance; he is able to create scenes that are at once totally accessible, concerned with beauty and leisure, while hiding in them something of the radical. The background, in sharp contrast to the realism of the girls, appears almost as a stage set, lacking focus and depth. Colors dance alongside each other, trees disappear into shimmering rivers and a town emerges like a fairytale across the water. Every element is perfectly balanced, it glows with the light of a dream and exists in a world without worry. 

VICTOR VASARELY

Between the kinetic sculpture of Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Tinguely and the Pop Art of Andy Warhol sits the great Victor Vasarely. Working as an advertising designer in the 1930s, Vasarely developed a deep understanding of the power of geometric forms as a tool for attention. He became almost scientific about the behaviour of the human eye on a visual plane, and saw that the subtle optical illusions commanded discomfort, focus, and intrigue. Using industrially manufactured paints in their most slickly seductive forms, he created flat, one dimensional planes that he imbued with an impossible movement in the viewers mind. 'For me,’, he said, ‘Kineticism is what moves through the soul of the spectator when the eye is forced to organise an unstable perceptive field’. For all the visual trickery, his work is deeply soulful. It swallows you, begins to vibrate at the frequency of your neurons, ebbing and flowing in line with the viewers own energy. Vasarely lay the groundwork for a generation of artists who came to define the 20th century, and his own fingerprints can still be seen across contemporary art and design.

GEORGES BRAQUE

While Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began together, creating the vocabulary of cubism that would go on to inform the entire 20th century art movement, by 1941 the two had gone their separate ways. Picasso was restless, experimenting further and defying boundaries at every turn as he became increasingly unclassifiable in his practice. Braque, on the other hand, was rigorous, disciplined, and singularly focused on mastering Cubism and continuing to burn the torch for the art movement that he developed. His later works, such as Still Life with Fish here, are some decades removed from the origins of the movement and the increased wisdom is clear. Gone are the dizzying, erratic geometries that obscured the subject into kaleidoscopic wonder and in their place is a gentle, deftly handled study of perspective. The wildness of youth and excitement of the new has been tempered by a deep understanding of his forms and style, and Still Life with Fish is a masterful example. Its radicalness creeps up on you - at first glance it looks like a recognisable scene but the more you engage, the more you see just how many perspectives Braque shows this simplicity in. While Picasso may have answered more questions in his wild career, Braque answers are perhaps more concise.

RICHARD ESTES

Perfectly empty, eerily perfect - Estes’ worlds are devoid of people and rendered in such remarkable detail as to almost appear as photographs. Yet it is their perfection that belies their truth, for no camera at the time would have been able to capture such even focus across such a vast depth of field as Estes could do with oil and a brush. His works are uncanny and uncomfortable, the abandoned spaces give us nothing to grab onto. He paints the visual complexity of urban life and reveals it for its difficulties by removing the human, leaving us only able to stare in aesthetic appreciation or horror at the world we inhabit. In this way, Este asks us to slow down with his work, to show that all around us there is room for visual appreciation for those with the eyes to see. To see through the noise of city life, details begin to emerge everywhere - the beauty of typography on a sign, the arrangement of flowers and paving stones, the subtle architecture of storefronts. In Estes’ hands, the mundane comes to life on the page and in the viewers mind.

ADOLF GOTTLIEB

A floating orb glows with searing intensity. It is the summer sun that brings with it joys and dangers in equal measure, that enforces a regularity and order to life dictated by its rising and falling. Below, a violent, calligraphic, abstract form grounds us in entropy, chaos, and the fallibility of humans. “I feel that I use color in terms of an emotional quality... a vehicle for the expression of feeling.”, said Gottlieb, “Now what this feeling is, is something I probably can't define, but since I eliminated almost everything from my painting except a few colors and perhaps two or three shapes, I feel a necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the particular shapes, carry the burden of everything that I want to express, and all has to be concentrated within these few elements. Therefore, the color has to carry the burden of this effort”. And carry the burden, his colors do: soft pink hues, electric scarlet, dark blood reds, and the brown of earth speak to apocalypse as much as to connection and human flesh. Gottlieb represents summer as something that engulfs us, that we long for and fear, and mustn’t look at too long in case it damages our eyes.

EL GRECO

As the Last Supper finished, Jesus retreated to the Garden of Gethsemane. He brought with him Peter, John, and James, and asked them to stay awake and pray, while he went further ahead, alone and began to ask his father for salvation. "My Father,”, he said, “if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as You, not I, would have it. If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, Your will be done!” Knowing his fate, that he was destined for the cross, and the agony of death, his humanness shows. He fears what is ahead of him, and bargains one last time for a world in which his fated end may be escaped. Yet, despite it all, he is adamant that if this really is what is required, he will do it willingly. Leaving the garden, he finds the three apostles who had accompanied him fast asleep, and declares them strong in spirit but weak in flesh. One of the most important stories in the Passion of Jesus, El Greco renders this moment in perfect duality. Christ exists in the centre, flanked by humanity and divinity, caught between worlds with dignity and fear.

CLAUDE MONET

Even the great master of Impressionism himself, who had taught the world how to capture nature, light, color, and form in all of its beauty and translate the splendour of the environment into oil and canvas, felt humbled by the view ahead of him. Spending the summer in France’s southern coast in the old town of Antibes, Claude Monet would walk the landscapes along the Azure Coast with his easel and canvas, setting up to paint en plein air, wherever the beauty struck him. Yet, unusually, he laboured over the works here. The sun, the trees, the sea, all were, as he wrote in letters to friends and contemporaries, almost too beautiful to bear - ‘In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones’, he wrote to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He saw Antibes as a fairy-tale town, one that existed as much in the imagination as it did in reality, and so his usually deftness of capturing the impression, the feeling of a moment was further out of reach. Yet his work here is some of the most delicate and beautiful of his career, the dazzling sweetness of the landscape is abundant and intoxicating.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

“A line is a line, but is [also] a color. It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles.” This is at the very heart of Helen Frankenthaler’s work. In every corner of the canvas, there is the opportunity for change, for deception, and for interpretation. Developing a technique known as ‘soak-staining’, whereby she loosed oil paint and allowed the natural flow of a viscous matter to guide the formal shapes of the work, Frankenthaler’s process was open to the chaos of the world. Oil paints take on the quality of watercolour, and what would once be considered mistakes become acts of deep intention. For all of its aesthetic beauty and apparent simplicity, in her hand the artwork becomes a vehicle for painterly deception. Perhaps, then, Frankenthaler is simply making explicit that which we have always known about painting; that we are willing tricked in each instance we engage with it.

FRANK STELLA

Restless forms are constrained by their canvas. Arcs and circles push against their geometric home, straining their boundaries and compressing against the confinement of the rectangle. Stella had, in the period before this series of works was executed, been using canvases of irregular shapes, defined by the forms of the painting themselves. The same ideas are at play here, namely those of the relationship between the surface and the image upon it, but the surface now takes precedence. Stella’s forms, made by a protractor and paint, seem to fight against each other for prominence; as you stare into the flat expanse of the image the colors dance between the foreground and background. Despite it’s pleasing, almost gentle appearance, there is a fight happening in every aspect of the painting, a battle for visual priority between forms and right of space between surface and image. The painting, in this way, transcends its abstract forms to become something tangibly real - Stella imbues visual forms with a life-force quite unlike any other.

FERNAND LÉGER

Cubism, war, and industrialism - these were the three muses of Léger’s career in the early 1920s. One of the first artists to join Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s new movement of Cubism, he exhibited in all of the early shows and helped define the new art language to the public. While his contemporaries cubist forms were rigid and angular, Léger’s style came to be known as “Tubism”, so named for the tubular, pipe like mechanical structures that served as the subjects or motifs for so much of his early work. Yet experiences fighting at the front in World War I softened his allegiances to industrial forms, and by 1922 he had swapped metal for flesh, and abstracted still lives had been replaced by figurative forms, still retaining his ‘Tubist’ influences. Léger felt that art was more important than ever in the post-war period, and that the work he had been doing before the war was academic, restrictive and inaccessible to most save for the privileged, educated few. His movement toward portraiture and nudes was an attempt to show the poetry of the everyday experience, to take images and scenes familiar to the masses and elevate them into something unusual, thought-provoking and beautiful.

ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ

The intensity of simple, human experiences - this is what Abraham Walkowitz strove for in his work. Part of the first wave of American Moderists who brought the European ideals and philosophies to the United States, Walkowtiz interpreted these ideas in a uniquely American way. Where the European leading figures, such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Braque, were pushing the boundaries of thought and making art that was intentionally intellectual, laden with concepts as much as beauty that challenged and inspired, Walkowtiz digested these same progressions but approached them with what the artist and critic Oscar Bluemner called ‘an inner necessity.’ This is clear in his parade scene. The work is a masterful display of early abstraction, loose, sparing brushstrokes and vivid, varied colours give the suggestion of a scene without rigid focus of detail. Yet, for all the revolution in the technique and composition, the work is brimming with life and with joy. The essence of the parade is captured, the excitement of the human experience bounds across the paper. The viewer does not need education or information to understand the heart of Walkowtiz’s work, it exists for all to see.