PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Renoir could hardly hold a paintbrush in 1910. Rheumatoid arthritis had rendered his body feeble and the exacting brushstrokes of his youth impossible. Retreating to the French countryside he refused to give up. Instead, in his final years, he developed an entirely new artistic style fitting to the requirements of his ailing body. In his last self portraits, the canvas became a mirror to the soul of the artist, a celebration of the past and a defiant statement of life in the face of increasingly clear mortality. Renoir represented the end of an artistic journey of portraiture that started with Reubens nearly 400 years earlier. He was the last of his kind, a painter steeped in tradition, embrassing tentatively the Impressionist present he found himself in. In this self-portrait, Renoir immortalizes not just himself, but the essence of artistic endeavor—a testament to the enduring dialogue between creator and creation, between past and future, and between the mortal and the immortal.

CLYFFORD STILL

A field of colour, torn at the seams. The movement is visceral across the canvas, almost ominous as the dark blues seem to grow across the background of brightness and then, in the corner, a flash of yellow comes alive, emerging out of the oppression. Clyfford Still may not be a household name in the way that Pollock or Rothko have become, but it was him who laid the foundations of the entire movement. In 1938, years before his contemporaries, he moved away from figurative work into pure abstraction, allowing colours and the movement of paint to communicate emotion quite unlike any had done before. Dragging palette knives across the paint, the works took on a sense of motion. He combined the two styles of ‘Colour Field’ painting and ‘Action Painting’, to create meditative works that felt tangibly alive, even angry, and this influence can be seen across the movements that followed him.

ANNI ALBERS

Anni Albers took to weaving reluctantly. As a young woman studying at the Bauhaus, there were few opportunities for her, and the workshops she wanted to attend were not permitted for women. So, out of misogyny and requirement, she took a class on weaving, headed by the school’s only female ‘master’. “"In my case it was threads that caught me, really against my will.”, she said, “To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over." And the world is indebted still to the threads that tangled her, for Albers revolutionised the world with her art. She blurred the lines between traditional craftwork and fine art, which had long been separated, gendered pursuits. Her marriage to fellow artist Josef Albers was amongst the most consequential partnership of post-war art, and while he redefined the study of colour, Anni revolutionised forms and patterns. Together, they created a new visual language that we still speak today, and Anni’s embrace of craft weaving, giving new dimensions to her work that other mediums couldn’t match, was one of the most consequential reluctant decisions ever made.