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.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

“I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”, said Robert Rauschenberg. He is describing his ‘Combine Paintings’, of which Untitled is amongst the very earliest, that marked a major shift not just in the Abstract Expressionist that was the dominant movement of the day, but in the course of American Art. They bridged a gap between Abstract Expressionism and the soon emergent Pop Art, combining found imagery and pop culture objects with a saturation of thick, impasto paintwork and an openness to chance operations and randomness that allows for perceptual shifts in the work. As Rauschenberg developed this style of art-marking further, the images became more refined, clearer in their messages and ideologies. Yet here we see the beginnings of change, the first step towards a flattening of mediums where painting and sculpture became not separate practices but something combined.

HENRY MATTSON

In Woodstock, New York, Henry Mattson could starve more slowly and more comfortably than he could in the city. This was his own admission and resignation, that life as an artist would not bring wealth or comfort but was worthwhile nonetheless, and he could live in Woodstock for pennies on the Manhattan dollar enough to pursue the only thing he ever wanted to do. Born in Sweden, he arrived in America at the turn of the century with thirteen dollars in his pocket. He picked up irregular work at machine shops, harvester companies, and landscaping firms while taking art classes in the evenings and painting as a hobby. He was encouraged by his mentor to give up painting and find a trade, advice Mattson followed for a little while until he found it impossible to continue to deny his truest desire. So to Woodstock he went, subsidising his painting with odd jobs until, through perseverance and talent, he became nationally renowned and a hero of the artists movements of upstate New York. He was, in so many ways, an archetype of the American dream, and of the northern dreamer of folk tradition who believed in beauty so much that he risked it all, and won.