ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

Different times call for different images, so thought Adolph Gottlieb, and in the tumultuous times during and after the Second World War, the images that were need were Pictographs. Developed by Gottlieb as a way to unify his disparate interests in surrealism, geometric abstraction and native art from across the Americas, they serve as readable images that transform symbols into meaning. They are a way to translate the complications, neurosis, and chaos of modernity into something accessible to the subconscious, cutting through the noise of a difficult world with abstraction. Yet, abstraction was not a word Gottlieb liked to use, he said that “to my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.” The symbols, neatly divided into grids, becomes figures, faces, creatures of the recesses of our mind that seem to communicate wordlessly of a world within us. 

ACHILLE LAUGÉ

A peasant boy from a small town, Laugé struggled to make it as an artist in the capital city. Moving to Paris to paint at 21 while he worked in a pharmacy to cover the bills, he was surrounded by a scene of artists changing the culture around them, but doing so from a position of some societal power. He, on the other hand, found himself isolated and without connections in the city, and when his work was exhibited in significant exhibitions alongside Bonnard, Denis, Toulouse-Lautrec and others, it was derided for it’s attempts to ‘impress’. Class prejudice seemed to surround him, and even in his artworks, inspired by the pointillist and post-impressionist styles of the day, viewers sensed this struggle for upward mobility. When his father died, Laugé returned home to the small town he was born, Caligula. He built a modest house for him and his family, and prepared himself for a simple, austere life. Yet it was back in these humble beginnings that inspiration struck anew. He constructed a studio within a horse-drawn cart and travelled the region, painting the landscapes in oil and pastel before returning to the work in his home studio. He style simplified, in match with his surroundings, and the very thing he had ran away from brought him mastery and success.

CUNO AMIET

A monumental canvas of more than four square metres has the majority of its bulk dedicated to the infinitesimal small variations of white on a snowy day. The figure, a long skier who traverses the length of the artwork in a desperate attempt to reach its end, is comically small with the bulk of colour behind dwarfing him. The work is deeply unusual, all the more so for the fact it was painted at the turn of the century. The modern viewer, after a near century of artists such as Rauschenberg, Malevich, Ryman and others creating all white canvases, may be used to the starkness of this work, but Amiet predates even the earliest of these by some fifteen years. The work is presented as a landscape, but it becomes about the insignificance of man in the face of nature, the perseverance of the human spirit and, perhaps most simply, of the effect of colour. Amiet never achieved major success in his life, and has remained undeservedly unknown today. His work was, perhaps, so ahead of his time, so singular that he was destined to remain of the fringe of a world he anticipated before so many others.