ANN BROCKMAN

In the book of Genesis, we are told the story of two angels who visit Lot, his wife, and children in the sinful city of Sodom. They warn the family of the impending disaster that the iniquity of the place will bring, and to leave right away for their own safety, and not look back in the process. As they flee, Lot’s wife turns back to look at the home she has left behind and, because this directly disobeyed the rule of the angels, she is turned into a pillar of sand. The story has its roots in many mythological tales, with the theme of turning to look back a feature of the fables of ancient cultures. Lot’s wife is never given a name further than this, she is an object of possession and her significance in Genesis is purely to serve as a reminder of the dangers of revealing that which you truly desire. Yet Brockman takes a tired story with an ignored protagonist and elevates into a work of gentle, powerful defiance with deftness and beauty.

DIEGO RIVERA

Hunched over a loom in total focus, Rivera’s subject balances not just her practice but the story of a nation in her lap. Rivera’s portrait is not just of any weaver but of Luz Jiménez, a master weaver, historian, and as a Nahua woman, part of the largest Indigenous group in Mexico, who became a thought leader and teacher to members of the Mexican Nationalist movement like Rivera. Practicing and passing on the traditional artworks, skills, and languages that she had learnt from her mother and other family members, she became a figure of inspiration to a group of artists who saw her as the embodiment of a pre-colonial Mexico. Many subjects of Rivera and his contemporaries’s paintings came from stories told to them and ideas explained by Jiménez, so by making her the subject and protagonist of a work, he pays a debt to the education she provided. 

CLAUDE MONET

An image without context, without time, and without place becomes an image of everything. When Claude Monet purchased a house in the French countryside, he planned to turn the garden into an aesthetic feast for the eyes, and built a small bridge, overlooking a pond filled with water lilies. He would spend the next thirty years, the final of his life, painting this scene in variation and repetition, producing more than 250 images of water lilies. When he began, they were more conventional representations of his garden scene and included the bridge, the surrounding trees, the horizon and a sense of their time and place. Yet by 1906, when this image was painted, he had been working with this subject for a decade and the surroundings began to drop away, the surface of the water and flowers that gently rested on top taking up more and more of the canvas until, as we see here, they became the totality. Nothing else matters in this painting, it is a single instant, a moment of nature untied to a human hand or human conceptions. It is unbridled beauty, without distraction - flowers sit in perfect tension and the reflection of above ripples in abstraction to create an image of a small world existing in infinity.