CLAUDE MONET

In the suburb of Le Havre, a wealthy suburb of Northern France, Claude Monet saw the world changing. He had grown up by the seaside, on beaches just like the one depicted here, and knew well the rural life of the areas, small towns serving locals and dominated by a thriving fishing industry. Yet as industrialism took over the nation, train services connected these once self-sustaining communities to the major cities and brought with them an influx of tourists escaping metropolis for weekends by the sea. In his depiction of Saint-Andresse, Monet captures this duality. The foreground is dominated by fishermen, their boats resting on the sand as they mill around and smoke their pipes, wearing hardy and utilitarian garb. Yet behind them, sitting on the beach, a couple look out to sea, the woman in a flowing white dress with an accent of red below here. These are the city folk, representing modernity itself that is slowly encroaching on traditional, rural life. Monet makes no moral judgement, but the work is one of quiet conflict between two types of life, learning to exist together.

DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

At the age of twelve, Diego Velázquez joined the workshop of Francisco Pacheco, a painter, sculptor, and art theorist. He saw in the young man an irrepressible talent, and spent the next six years teaching him his craft, and his theories. Velázquez spent much of his time in Pacheco’s studio painting the wooden sculptures that were commissioned by various churches and collectors across Spain, and when he left Pacheco’s tutelage at the age of 18, it is unsurprising that his paintings had remarkably sculptural qualities to them. This work, ‘The Immaculate Conception’, is one of the earliest known works by the great Spanish master, and it’s rendering of the Virgin Mary seems to place her across three dimensions. The folds of her drapery seem to be deeply carved, the clasped, praying hands emerging towards us, and her form perfectly balanced atop the moon. Velázquez is able to make her feel at once totally alive, and entirely sculptural, a fitting dialogue for the sinless mother of Christ who balances divinity and humanity upon her shoulders.

MAX BECKMANN

Of all the artists despised by the Nazi Party in 1930s, Max Beckmann was amongst the most reviled. After the First World War, a boom of intellectualism occurred in Germany, with Berlin as its centre point, and the city became a fertile breeding ground for a new avant-garde that questioned the order of things before. Artists, writers, dancers, performers, musicians, and designers contributed to a culture of the Weimar Republic that was free, wild, and radical at every stage. As Hitler rose to power, he saw these movements as being in direct opposition to his philosophies, decrying it as degenerate art. Book burnings of works of Jewish intellectuals and modernist writers occurred, and the seizing of experimental, expressive, and modern work took place in galleries across the country. Beckmann became a figure head of all that Hitler saw as wrong with the creative culture of the nation, and the artist had to flee the country. This self portrait was his last painted in his home country, and it serves as a defiant declaration of his brilliance, in both skill and composition. He stand atop a staircase, elegantly dressed in a tuxedo, his eyes glancing angrily out of frame while the background behind him descends into turmoil.