ISAAC ISRAËLS

Visually striking, the three girls and their donkeys are little more than coincidental in this work. Instead, it is a classic of Impressionism in that is more a study of light that of anything so concrete as human figures. Israël captures an essence of summer, and the fact that the girls he painted were real people, children of his friends, does not negate from the universality of his depiction. Nature, childhood, sun, sand, and sea - these are the top line ideas, the qualities that across the globe we associate with the warm months, and with a sense of freedom. Israëls philosophy supports this idea, he believed in painting quickly, never working too hard or too long on a piece lest it began to take on a feeling of laboriousness. Instead, he painting quickly, no more than two hours at a time, in doing so was able to capture a sense of urgency and vitality that can come only with the extreme present.

AGNES PELTON

Agnes Pelton left Long Island for a new life in the Southern California desert. The sea change of the title is both a personal and a cultural one, as she felt the visual world moving into heady, metaphysical directions. The work is oblique, its abstract forms are shapely and organic, conjuring up the ebb and flow of water and the curvature of the female form in equal measure. It is unplaceable, framed by architectural details that open onto neither sea nor land but instead a consciousness. Pelton saw the movement of thought in the movement of the tides, of nature, that lapped and retreated in quiet crescendoes before crashing into realisation. Art, she thought, channeled the universal energies around us through color and light, able to be perceived as active being which vibrate like, Pelton said, “the fragrance of a flower [which] fills the consciousness with the essence of its life.” 

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

In 1920, Piet Mondrian reached his artistic maturity with a style that would redefine the very meaning of art. Thin black lines separating rectangular forms, predominantly white but with scarce bursts of primary colours. It was the realisation of Mondrain’s vision for “pure abstract art… completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances’, and was, for many, the pinnacle of abstraction. Yet, 40 odd years later, the American pop artist  Roy Lichtenstein paints a Mondrian and, while he changes almost nothing, completely redefines the very nature of abstraction. Lichtenstein’s paints a Mondrian because Mondrian’s signature style was so defined, had such a unique and clear language, that it was able to be generically reproduced. And all that Lichtenstein changes is the addition of two panels of Ben-Day dots as a stand in for solid colour. He abstracts that which is reduced to its most simple, turns a solid block into repetitive disks, removing Mondrian’s artistic conclusion even further away from the naturalistic appearance it was escaping. For all that, the piece works on another, more disquieting level. By co-opting and adapting a style of total abstraction, Lichtenstein undoes the very goal it set out to seek. The piece is no longer abstract, instead it is a representational, photo-realist recreation of an object. The work has been retained, it’s visual success has made it a style, and so it has lost its freedom for it represents above all itself.