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. 

LUCIEN COUTAUD

Dreamlike paintings, exploring the subconscious in beautifully rendered, immaculate detail; Lucien Coutaud had all of the trappings of surrealism and yet never identified with the group. As a young man in 1920s Paris, he found himself at the heart of a the avant-garde, forging friendships with Surrealist founder Andre Breton, fellow artist Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst, and writers Paul Eluard and Jean-Paul Satre. Were it not for his constant refusal of the label, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that Coutaud was as much as surrealist as Dali or Magritte. Instead, he called his style ‘Eroticomagie’, translating simply as Erotic Magic. This is a fitting description, for in almost all of his paintings there exists an underlying sensuality. Dreamlike, fairy-tale lands and impossible worlds have this strange duality when pictured with Coutaud’s brush - a sombreness pervades atop a sexually charged energy. Inspired, perhaps, by the fledgling psychoanalytical movement, his paintings seem to marry the two human drives of sex and death in soft blues and beautiful greys.

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.