PAUL KLEE

‘First of all,’, said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, ‘the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.’ Of course, Illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky – Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page.

JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCIA

There are no contradictions. Nothing is incompatible. These were the tenets that guided Torres-Garcia’s life, the life of a writer, painter, sculptor, teacher, theorist, muralist, novelist and architect; a renaissance man of the highest order. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain in 1891 and began a career as an artist. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found numerous schools, groups and movements including the first European Abstract art group and push the art and culture of Europe and South America to its vanguard. It was the duality of his homeland and his adopted nations that drove Torres-Garcia, and his ability to hold this duality together in a single mind. He existed between places, carrying the identity of Uruguay with him everywhere, and in doing so he was able too to carry the new and the old, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction. There are no contradictions, he said, nothing is incompatible.

EDWARD HOPPER

A far-off storm felt under clear skies, ground swells are harbingers of things to come, messengers of danger. When Hopper painted this work in 1939, he could feel a change brewing in the air. The Second World War was looming and American isolationism was beginning to wane, it would not be long before they were a part of the conflict happening across the sea. To this uneasy world, Hopper responds with a depiction of freedom, of youth, and of the surging promise of youth, The boys on the boat look out to a buoy in the water, ringing with the motion of the waves. They are sun drenched and the sea water spits up gently, but they are off kilter. Small waves rock their boat ever so slightly, but the waves seem unrelenting. Hopper was most known for his depictions of urban loneliness and melancholy and this picture, with its vibrant blues and idyllic scene, seems anomalous. Yet the same themes pervade, on a grander, more cosmic scale. Hopper depiction of a happy American scene is perhaps his most ominous of all.