ANNIBALE CARRACCI

Lauded and lusted after by great collectors over millennia, it stayed in the single commissioning family for most of its life, rejecting offers from the King of England for its possession before finding its permanent home in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836. Annibale Carracci’s monumental work was an object of desire not simply for its aesthetic beauty or holy reverence but for its position as the synthesis of an era. Carracci is regarded as one of the founders of Baroque, returning to the classical monumentality of early Renaissance masters but adding in a vivid and dynamic lifeblood. Here, he took the styles of the day from across northern and southern Italy and united them into something that felt remarkably new. Classical sculpture, the cartoons of Rafael and the bright Roman frescoes of the 1400s meet in a work that rejected the more naturalistic vogues that Caravaggio was pioneering and brought back a sense of dramatics to religious art that would sustain for the hundreds of years after his passing.

WALT KUHN

A boy from the Brooklyn docks, working at a bicycle repair shop at the turn of the 20th century, set off for California with sixty dollars in his pocket and the dream to create art. Once there, he travelled to Europe and traversed the continent, exploring the fledgling artistic movements and finding himself as an early American voyeur to modernism. Bringing this movement back to his native New York, Kuhn worked to establish a school of American Modernism and in 1913, organised the legendary Armoury Show which established the United States as a consequential player in the new artistic world. Yet as he aged, Kuhn came to the question his loyalty to the modernism he had championed, and found himself between worlds, adrift in the seas he himself had planted. While his earlier work depicted performers, dancers, circus acts and vaudeville characters, his later work came to focus on still lives. There is something in the flowers, their droops and springs, the curves and sharp edges that still carries something of the performer in them. In his moments of calmness, Kuhn still found a part of the energetic, young man seeking new life and experiences. 

STUART DAVIS

At the age of 19 Stuart Davis was the youngest artist in the 1913 Armory Show, a turning point in American Modernism. The work he was there, especially those by Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso, had a profound effect on him, and for the next decade he was a devotee to the schools of Cubism and Modernism, painting works that fit into the contemporary avant-garde. By the start of the 1920s, however, Davis had developed as a painter and found a signature style quite unlike anything being made at the time. Predating Pop-Art by nearly 40 years, he fused advertising graphics and commercial products with a hard lines and flat expanses of colour in works he called ‘Color-Space Compositions’. To begin, these were limited to still lives and landscapes, but in 1928 he spent a year in Paris where he would travel around the city each day and return home to paint the urban scenes he had encountered. To look at these works today is to feel a familiarity with the style, something harmonious and understandable, but at the time these were radical explorations of art. Davis used foundations of simplicity, reducing spatial perception, to add adornments of complication that reveal hidden details and meaning in every corner.