ANDY WARHOL

Before he was Andy Warhol, Andrew Warhola was making a living as a commercial illustrator in 1950’s New York. He drew shoes for magazines and manufacturers, designed book covers for pulp novels and record covers for weekly hits and, in the role that allowed him the most bounds for experimentation, he created greeting and holiday cards for Tiffany and Co, as well as the MOMA. It is unsurprising, to know Warhol as we do today, that he always loved Christmas. He was a devout man, and charitable throughout his life, but something of the kitsch, Americana of contemporary Christmas festivities spoke to him and the designs he made for Christmas cards become his most popular. Using a unique technique of blotting ink and then tracing hard outlines on a new sheet of paper lowered atop the original, Warhol’s distinctive style of the day lent itself to festivities. His illustrations are warm and playful, full of character while retaining a remarkable simplicity in their style. It was not long before his genius was noticed, and he dropped the ‘a’ of his last name to become the artist we know today, but in these early, commercial works, we can see so many of the technical and contextual components that led to his maturity.

ANDREAS FEININGER

Feininger was not interested in people. A pioneer of modern photography, both as an artist, a writer, and an educator, almost none of his thousands of images are of humans. Instead, he captured cities, skylines, and the natural world. To look at his images is to see a flattening between these two seemingly exclusive realms. Close up, almost abstract images of shells, bones, plants and minerals seem to speak the same language as his moody, atmospheric, and often revealing images of Manhattan or, as this image is from, Stockholm. Training first as an architect, he worked at the Bauhaus where his neighbour was Moholy-Nagy, one of the founding fathers of the modern photograph. He took up the camera and never looked back, yet his architectural training is evident in everything. This abstraction of the Stockholm ground looks like a work of urban planning run wild, as much as it does some unknowable natural form. Feininger saw buildings, cities, and modernity as something not against the natural world but altogether in dialogue with it.

MARK ROTHKO

Having studied under the father of Color-Field painting himself, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko took the genre in new and staggering directions. Applying thin layers of diluted oil paint, painstakingly slowly so as to build up soft hues on the canvas such that the works are almost luminous in their color, Rothko wanted to control the viewer on a carnal level. He removed the intellectualism of Albers and many of the abstract expressionists around him. Instead, he didn’t want the viewer to try and rationalise the work or any feelings it provoked - Rothko tried to find an innate, visceral science to color that when executed in tandem and relation to each other, as seen here, could bring the viewer on a preset journey of emotion. It is for this same reason that almost all of his works were unnamed - any context outside of the experience of viewing them felt unnecessary and could detract from the deeply human experience of hues and shades affecting oneself.