ANDRIAEN VAN DE VENNE

Commercially viable but laden with political and religious allegories, the work of van de Vedde achieved him enormous success and fame in his lifetime, becoming a popular illustrator of the current day. This work, one of a series depicting the changing seasons, is exemplary of his style, full as it is with wry wit, shrewd observations and a genuine, aesthetic beauty. Revellers skate across a frozen lake at the height of winter, wearing ornamental garb that shows their wealth. To their left, an old, peasant women and her two young children stand with a look of worry across their faces, on the precipice of the land and water. It is a painting of two halves, a sign of the differences in culture explained through the mediums of the earth. On the bank, there is poverty and crudeness; a man defecates by a tree while a dog does the same infant of him, a figure looks perversely at the revealed bottom of a fallen woman and the trees are bear and sad. The colours are muted browns and greys that speak to a sadness of the winter period. Yet, on the right hand sign, a winter sun shines and wealth abounds in fanciful dress, playful movement and bright colours. Van de Vedde creates a work of truthful duality, a portrait of a nation in winter time, divided by inhabiting the same space. 

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.