AMEDEO MODIGLIANI

Two friends shared the commonality of context, but a radical difference in philosophy. Amedeo Modigliani and Jacques Lipchitz had arrived in Paris at the same age, and were two young Jewish men frequenting the same literary circles who became very close friends. Lipchitz exemplified a industriousness, working as a sculptor he was exacting and prolific, single-minded in his ambition as he became of Cubism’s most significant sculptors. Modigliani, on the other want, was the archetypal bohemian; a terrible drunk, he lived a fast life of debauchery and worked with speed, looseness, and the confidence of his brilliance. This is a rare work of Modigliani’s, not only for being one of the few double portraits he ever painted in his career, but also for the amount of time he spent on it. Lipchitz had recently come into some money when he commissioned the work of him and his wife from this friend. Modigliani’s charged only ten francs and painted the work in a single sitting. Lipchitz, wanting to help Modigliani financially, encouraged him to keep working on the painting for two weeks, paying him for it, despite Modigliani’s objections. The finished result is a work of delicate, assured beauty, not as loose as most of his canvases but retaining all the disquiet harmony.

MASAHISA FUKASE

Masahisa Fukase desperately sought control. Both the first and second wives of the 'anti-self-portraitist' suffered under his incessant, obsessive documentation of their likenesses. It was only after his second divorce, returning on the mournful JE-train from Tokyo to his hometown of Hokkaido, that Fukase first glimpsed what was to become his defining obsession. Collected first as ‘The Solitude of Ravens’, the original title explains much of Fukase's intention - wallowing in depressive bachelorhood. The photographer spent the next eleven years in his birthplace, spiralling through his ceaseless fascination with its growing population of ‘ravens’. In all fact, the majority of the birds were anything but - for Hokkaido has few raven roosts, outnumbered in their hundreds by the myriad crows. It was the idea of ravens that compelled Fukase; in 1982, his journal read “karasu ni nata (I have become a raven)”.

MAX ERNST

As a young child, Max Ernst stood in-front of German forests and felt an overwhelming sense of fear and wonder. The wood loomed over him with ‘delight and oppression and what the Romantics called ‘emotion in the face of Nature.’’, said Ernst many years later. He captures this spiritual relationship, one of feeling part of the invisible world that hides within nature, in this painting, produced during one of his most prolific and inspired periods. Using his radical technique of ‘frottage’, whereby he rubbed pencil, charcoal, or pigment creates a relief from natural matter behind the paper. Ernst created a forest out of wood. The effect of petrified trees came from bark itself, folded and adapted to form the shape that Ernst desired. In this way, as much as the painting deals with Ernst’s feelings of smallness in the face of grand nature, it also represents a conquering of the very elements that caused him feelings of such oppression as a child.