GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

The last painting in her much revered series, O’Keeffe takes the flower to its abstract conclusion. She turns the stigma into a surreal form, the hues of the petals become a expansive background to a winding road. She reduces nature into something formal and emotional, and requires the viewer to read it as they like. “I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown.” Said O’Keeffe, “So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.” When she began her Jack-in-the-Pulpit series, which sees the flowers move across four canvases from reality to abstraction, Georgia O’Keeffe was all but unknown. A female modernist painter in a male dominated world, attempting to carve a name for herself. By the time the series was completed, she had gained reputation and with it, speculation. Every viewer tried to create their own narrative of the artist from her paintings of flowers, casting her as an artist of repression, of longing, of lust, of feminism, of tradition. But O’Keeffe has long defied any easy narrative, she is an artist of America and as broad and complicated as the country she captured, through its abstraction and its reality.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Each new art movement offers a new interpretation of the world, a novel way of representing that which we all see slightly differently. In the twentieth century, it seemed that these ways of seeing were never stagnant, each new decade bringing with it multiple, radical new conceptions of existence. For Roy Lichtenstein, one of the great masters of Pop Art in the American 1960s, his interest was in exploring, subverting, and adapting these representations in ways that spoke directly to the contemporary age. His most famous realisation of these ideas comes in his Benday Dot paintings, where he would reproduce panels from comic books or adverts, meticulously painting a mechanical process of reproduction. Yet, later in his life when he began his ‘Landscape Series’, which this painting is from, he began to flatten his influences into kaleidoscopic beauty. His River Valley contains within it decades of different artistic styles and different interpretations of the natural world, from the expressive brushstrokes and painterly hand to the rigorous lines and modern flourishes - it is an homage to art history, and a declaration that though times have changes, all painters are simply trying to find new ways to see the world.

ALFRED HENRY MAURER

Fusing the composition of Cubist art with the potently affecting feeling of Expressionism, Maurer’s dual heads occupied him for much of his career but it was only in his maturity that they realised their greatest forms. This one, painted just two years before he died from suicide at 64, is haunting. The two female figures become one, though their fusion seems almost unwilling, their eyes filled with trepidation. This uneasy duality was something the artist felt both personally, and in his artistic practice. Maurer began his career painting landscapes in a far more naturalist style, but began to look internally and found within himself a more abstract feeling. “It is impossible to present an exact transcription of nature”, he said, “It is necessary for art to differ from nature. Perhaps art should be an intensification of nature; at least it should express an inherent feeling which cannot be obtained from nature except through a process of association… The artist must be free to paint his effects. Nature must not bind him.”