DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

The flesh of Christ is so alive, so exquisitely rendered in oil such that we can almost see the pores of his skin, as to cause devotion and reverence at the sheer sight of it. This was the intended effect. Velazquez was painting at the time of the Catholic Reformation where an enormous emphasis was placed on Transubstantiation and thus the body of Christ was seen as a symbol of rebellious Catholicism in the face of the rising Protestantism. Hired as a court painter of the Spanish King Phillip IV, who tolerated a slow pace of work because he saw that he was a once-in-a-generation genius, Velazquez moved more towards religious imagery and away from the historical work and portraiture that had made his name. The paintings made under this patronage are amongst his most famous and significant, using his immense technical skill and a deep understanding of the transformational power of art to create stirring works of holy ordinance that elevate history and allegory into something tangible.

JASPER JOHNS

In order to create something new, Johns had to destroy all that he made before. An abstract expressionist up until the mid 1950s, Jasper Johns looked for a way to move beyond the movement and found it in simple, recurring motifs, but before he progressed with the new artistic career that would make his name, he destroyed all the canvases that he had produced before. The target was the perfect image for an artist looking for explicit meaning. Instantly recognisable, pre-existing, simple in it’s formation but open in its interpretation, from 1955 to 1961, John produced dozens of paintings and drawings featuring the target. There is something quintessentially American about John’s targets, tapping into a primary color Pop feeling that below it’s light joyousness perhaps hides something sinister. Too, for all of his attempt to abandon the Abstract Expressionist movement he had worked in, its influence is visible in the brushstrokes and the unusual application of encaustic, a hot wax mixed with pigment, that make up the image, hiding visual depth and the proof of a human hand in each stroke.

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

Amongst the most reproduced works of art in all of history, it is easy in the face of such abundance to forget the sheer revolutionary importance of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The first in series of thirty six views of Mount Fuji that Hokusai produced, and printed in an edition of roughly 100 from the original woodblock, the work gained immediate praise in his native Japan and shortly after in Europe, where it inspired the Impressionist movement. The print, as with others in the series, used the color Prussian Blue for the first time in Japanese print art, bringing a boldness to the medium that had not been seen before. Too, it combined traditional Japanese printing techniques with a European graphical perspective, synthesising the two continents disparate styles into a single work that could speak loudly across cultures. These two novel changes marked a shift in art history and a movement not to a homogenised global style but certainly towards a common language.