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.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Lichtenstein elevated the everyday into the extraordinary. Taking imagery from comic books and advertising, he took the imagery of contemporary existence, often derided and ignored by the public, and by placing on canvas through rigorous and arduous work of hand applying the Benday dots that were the byproduct of mass production from screen-printing, they became works of fine art. Here, the Alka-Seltzer becomes a motif of America, and of modern life in totality. Through graphic design, the glass rendered in high contrast black and white transforms itself from the mundane to the iconic, playing with ideas of renaissance art and religion, but bringing it down into the truth of the common man, depicting an image that feels at once familiar, and through his depiction, altogether foreign. Lichtenstein’s glass brims with excitement, it fizzes and pops with promise of the new, and by isolating the image, he grasps at the universal. 

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

Georgia O’Keeffe transformed desert planes into abstract color-fields, turned the flowers that grew in the heat into psychedelic explorations of form and movement, and skulls that dotted the landscapes into eerie motifs of the American Southwest. She was, and remains in the popular imagination, an artist so deeply tied to the land, and particularly that of her adopted New Mexico, that to imagine her is to do in the context of the great American landscape. So it is perhaps surprising that towards the end of her life, she turned her focus to the world above. Flying in planes around the world, she gazed out the window and saw new landscapes made from billowing clouds and horizons dancing in shades of blue made visible in the thin air. Gone are the earth tones of her seminal works, replaced by whites, blues, and peaches in calming expressions of scale. Sky Above Clouds IV was a significant undertaking, measuring more than twenty four feet across. It’s monumental size engulfs and invites us to stop and look, to lean our heads against the window and stare out into the expanse.