PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

A gentle joy exudes from every brushstroke. The radiance of youth and the calm of a warm summers day wash over us as Renoir’s delicate hand creates an image that seems to exist in both reality and fantasy at once. The central figure gazes absentmindedly into the distance, her face filled with contentment while her younger sister stares at us, rendered in a looser hand to look as if she has just run into the frame. This is at the heart of Renoir’s brilliance; he is able to create scenes that are at once totally accessible, concerned with beauty and leisure, while hiding in them something of the radical. The background, in sharp contrast to the realism of the girls, appears almost as a stage set, lacking focus and depth. Colors dance alongside each other, trees disappear into shimmering rivers and a town emerges like a fairytale across the water. Every element is perfectly balanced, it glows with the light of a dream and exists in a world without worry. 

GEORGES ROUAULT

Born in a Parisian cellar to a poor family, Georges Rouault rose through the ranks of France’s burgeoning avant-garde to become one of the most significant figures in Expressionism and Fauvism. At the age of 14, Rouault began an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer and his time working with heavy glass bonded by thick lead is evident in his later painting style. The thick black lines and brash energetic brushstrokes speak to both the medieval style of stained glass and the Expressionist movement that sought to capture a human emotion in both medium and content. The painting here, of a court judge, was one of 23 produced when Rouault was invited to observe proceedings in a courtroom. At the time of painting, he had become most known for paintings of Christ rendered in a similar style. He applies here the same generosity to the Judge as he does to religious figures. “If I have made of the judges lamentable figures,”, he said, “it is no doubt because I was betraying the anguish that I feel at the sight of one human being having to judge another. I would not be a judge for all the wealth and happiness in the world.”

JOHN STORRS

An architectural sculptor who, late in his career, began to translate three dimensions into two. John Storrs arrived at a style we would now firmly understand as Art Deco almost entirely independently, predating the widespread consolidation of the movement by nearly a decade. Abandoning his family business and forsaking his inheritance to seek new physical forms in Europe, he studied under Rodin, fraternised with Brancusi, Duchamp, and Man Ray. He translated these ideas and education into sculptural forms that incorporated Native American patterns, Gaelic structures, and Babylonian ziggurats. His work has an architectural eye, and uses the material of American industrialism; steel, brass and vulcanite replace stone in small sculptures that seem to speak to the soaring scale of the skyscrapers he grew up around. Though different in medium, his later paintings manage to bring the same philosophies of sculpture to linen. Interlocking forms and sharply defined colors create a sense of depth and scale that elevates them out of flatness and into a modernist world of dimensionality.