CLAUDE MONET

Even the great master of Impressionism himself, who had taught the world how to capture nature, light, color, and form in all of its beauty and translate the splendour of the environment into oil and canvas, felt humbled by the view ahead of him. Spending the summer in France’s southern coast in the old town of Antibes, Claude Monet would walk the landscapes along the Azure Coast with his easel and canvas, setting up to paint en plein air, wherever the beauty struck him. Yet, unusually, he laboured over the works here. The sun, the trees, the sea, all were, as he wrote in letters to friends and contemporaries, almost too beautiful to bear - ‘In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones’, he wrote to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He saw Antibes as a fairy-tale town, one that existed as much in the imagination as it did in reality, and so his usually deftness of capturing the impression, the feeling of a moment was further out of reach. Yet his work here is some of the most delicate and beautiful of his career, the dazzling sweetness of the landscape is abundant and intoxicating.

BLAKE

William Blake was steeped in the Bible. A deeply spiritual man who rejected organised religion, he found endless inspiration in the Testaments contained within and understood them as works to be interpreted -“Both read the Bible day and night”, he wrote, “But thou readst black where I read white”. It was not, for him, a prescriptive book but an inspiring one, the stories told were not historical fact or laws for life, but ways to understand oneself and the world around them. In every medium Blake worked in, from poetry and scholarship to watercolour and sculpture, the Bible played a part in his process and creation. The work here was commissioned as part of an enormous series depicting 80 subjects from the Bible. ‘The Whole Bible is filld with Imaginations & Visions from End to End”, he said, “And not with Moral virtues that is the baseness of Plato & the Greeks & all Warriors. The Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Domineering over others”.

WILLEM DE KOONING

De Kooning spent months finding the heart of an artwork. Meticulously building up thick layers of paint and then meticulously scraping them away, he worked as an excavator of beauty and truth. The title of this artwork, then, is fitting, and when it was completed it was his largest canvas to date. Inspired by an image of a woman working in a rice field from a Neo-realist Italian film, the organic forms and calligraphic lines seem to dance and flutter across the space, they’re movements revealing a hidden world of colour that lurks below. On initial viewing, the work seems wholly abstract, but as you get closer and begin to learn that language of his brushstrokes what was once a field of white becomes an orchestra of faces, objects, animals and bones. Eyes suddenly emerge out of vastness and fish swim through a squirming swathe of bodies - de Kooning forces the viewer to take on the same role as himself, and we become excavators of his vision the longer we look.