FERNAND LÉGER

Cubism, war, and industrialism - these were the three muses of Léger’s career in the early 1920s. One of the first artists to join Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s new movement of Cubism, he exhibited in all of the early shows and helped define the new art language to the public. While his contemporaries cubist forms were rigid and angular, Léger’s style came to be known as “Tubism”, so named for the tubular, pipe like mechanical structures that served as the subjects or motifs for so much of his early work. Yet experiences fighting at the front in World War I softened his allegiances to industrial forms, and by 1922 he had swapped metal for flesh, and abstracted still lives had been replaced by figurative forms, still retaining his ‘Tubist’ influences. Léger felt that art was more important than ever in the post-war period, and that the work he had been doing before the war was academic, restrictive and inaccessible to most save for the privileged, educated few. His movement toward portraiture and nudes was an attempt to show the poetry of the everyday experience, to take images and scenes familiar to the masses and elevate them into something unusual, thought-provoking and beautiful.

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”.