REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo spend most of the 1930s on the run. First from her native Spain where her outspoken political activism and relationship with a known anarchist artist made her a target for Franco in the rising Spanish Civil War. And then from Nazism in her adopted Paris for much the same reasons. A decade was spent moving from town to town in Western Europe, living a bohemian life of coffee shops, art and destitution with the avant-garde intellectuals of the day. While she was painting throughout, and well regarded for her surrealist works of esoteric magic, it was not until 1941 when she settled in Mexico City that she reached artistic maturity. The work made there is complex and beautiful, as much inspired by the folk practices of Mexico as the European Surrealists and intellectuals she had spent the previous decade with. There are nods to occult magic, and heady psychoanalytical dives into the subconscious which combine to make her work somewhat unclassifiable. It was while in Mexico that she became friends with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna and, together, they became known as ‘The Three Witches of Surrealism’. Yet the name has always been unjust, as together they elevated surrealist ideas into something more tender and complex, removing the masculine edge parts of the movement had to create a style that feels, even today, singular.

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.