ALBERT EDELFELT

Edelfelt took the techniques of the past to a distinctly contemporary scene. As one of the founders of the Finnish Realism movement, he painted the world as he saw it, adding no adornment and instead trying to depict the beauty in the everyday. In this, his most famous work and the most significant representation of the great scientist Louis Pasteur, Edelfelt found his perfect subject. Depicting Pasteur in his laboratory, surrounded by the cutting edge technology of the day, Edelfelt was able to depict the inherent beauty of modernity, and how the elegance of functionality and labour could be as aesthetically significant as the loftiest subjects. Though Pasteur was already revered when this portrait was painted, in fact he is depicted holding a rabbit’s spine that helped him develop the vaccine for Rabies and save untold lives across the centuries, there is a humbleness to the reality of the scene around him. The lighting, though reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance, is realistic, and the generosity paid is only to detail, Edelfelt is able to at once elevate the man and place him firmly within reality, depicting the simple truth that an everyday man and a genius can be one and the same.

HENRY DE WAROQUIER

Studies of architecture and mythology shifted the young de Waroquier away from a career in biology and towards one in art. From the latter, he learnt of Greek art, and its foundational idea that man existed at the centre of the universe. From the former, the ability and power to shape that universe, to respect it through the act of creation and the values that contributions to its landscape have in the right hands. As a child he had spent hours at the Natural History Museum of France, and was drawn to the minerals and fossils that seemed to speak of a unknown world hidden from public view; it was unsurprising then, that as he began to create images it was ones that spoke to a past, unknowable and often created world. His paintings combined the surreal imagery of the unconscious with the historical mediums of popular imagination, combining in a gentle cohesion that seems to transcend time.

CUNO AMIET

A monumental canvas of more than four square metres has the majority of its bulk dedicated to the infinitesimal small variations of white on a snowy day. The figure, a long skier who traverses the length of the artwork in a desperate attempt to reach its end, is comically small with the bulk of colour behind dwarfing him. The work is deeply unusual, all the more so for the fact it was painted at the turn of the century. The modern viewer, after a near century of artists such as Rauschenberg, Malevich, Ryman and others creating all white canvases, may be used to the starkness of this work, but Amiet predates even the earliest of these by some fifteen years. The work is presented as a landscape, but it becomes about the insignificance of man in the face of nature, the perseverance of the human spirit and, perhaps most simply, of the effect of colour. Amiet never achieved major success in his life, and has remained undeservedly unknown today. His work was, perhaps, so ahead of his time, so singular that he was destined to remain of the fringe of a world he anticipated before so many others. 

ACHILLE LAUGÉ

A peasant boy from a small town, Laugé struggled to make it as an artist in the capital city. Moving to Paris to paint at 21 while he worked in a pharmacy to cover the bills, he was surrounded by a scene of artists changing the culture around them, but doing so from a position of some societal power. He, on the other hand, found himself isolated and without connections in the city, and when his work was exhibited in significant exhibitions alongside Bonnard, Denis, Toulouse-Lautrec and others, it was derided for it’s attempts to ‘impress’. Class prejudice seemed to surround him, and even in his artworks, inspired by the pointillist and post-impressionist styles of the day, viewers sensed this struggle for upward mobility. When his father died, Laugé returned home to the small town he was born, Caligula. He built a modest house for him and his family, and prepared himself for a simple, austere life. Yet it was back in these humble beginnings that inspiration struck anew. He constructed a studio within a horse-drawn cart and travelled the region, painting the landscapes in oil and pastel before returning to the work in his home studio. He style simplified, in match with his surroundings, and the very thing he had ran away from brought him mastery and success.

MAURICE DENIS

Avant-garde sensibility and traditional religious thought are rectified in Denis’ work, quite unlike any of his contemporaries. From his teenage years, the French artist of humble means understood his role in life was to be a Christian painter, and while he was a seminal figure in various movements of radical modernity, he never deviated from this mission. Denis built a philosophy and theory around art-making that saw its purpose as a continuation of the act of Creation, as in the Genesis stories. The essence of art, for him, was the expression of love and faith and to serve as a refuge from the darkness of the world. He did not see beauty around him in the everyday, so attempted to find it in his paintings as a way of showing his faith and trust in God’s creation. Yet while these ideas about the function of art had existed for centuries before him, it was the style in which he applied them that made Denis so unique amongst religious artists. He was a founding member of the Nabis, a key Impressionist and a godfather to Cubism, Fauvism and Abstract art. While his contemporary artists were forsaking traditional roles across their lives as they forged a new artistic language, Denis remained personally traditional, living a stable and austere life that found joy in faith and family.

MIKHAIL LARIONOV

As one moves further from the epicentre of a movement, the ideas begin to distort. Concepts are reinterpreted in a game of geographic Chinese whispers and stylistic elements merge with local traditions into something altogether different. Such is the case with Mikhail Larionov’s work, painted in Russia but indebted to and inspired by the fauvist movement happening simultaneously in Paris. Combining a bright palette and loose dimensionality of the French avant-garde with the icon paintings of Russian history and traditional styles of woodcut illustration, the work is able to speak across time and place. Larionov named his style Neo-Primitivism, a combination of the old and the new that saw the past not as a distant land but a living collaborator in the present. Larionov would eventually leave Russia to live in Paris where he ingratiated himself to the very artists who’s style he had made his own, and there his paintings became more technically refined. Yet it is his early work, while still in his native land, that stands above, the gentle naivety combines with a contemporary understanding and art historical knowledge to create playful works of poignancy.

CÉZANNE

In the cold Parisian winters, Cézanne would paint in the greenhouse to keep warm. His studio was filled with assorted objects that he drew upon when needed, creating endless combinations from a small and simple repertoire in which to craft his still lives. An austere water pitcher, an old rum bottle with straw bindings, a tattered red cloth -  household objects which when placed against the plants in the greenhouse become works of contemplative beauty. Cézanne’s still lives can be understood as partial portraits of himself, revealing not only in the explicit clues they give us about his residence or living situation, but in the implicit form of the objects. The way leaves on the plants fall, the plumpness of the petals, the drape of the cloth; Cézanne was rigorous and particular about what he painted and when, and there are clues as to his state of mind in each brushstroke. When this works as painted, the artist was retreating from his impressionist contemporaries, and struggling with ill-health in the winter months. There is hopefulness in the plant life depicted, but a coolness of light pervades as if with the ambiguity of a future.

WOLFGANG PAALEN

As Europe was moving towards representative art under the Surrealist guidance of André Breton, a counter-insurgency was brewing. In their shared city of Paris, a group of artists that included Paalen formed Abstraction-Creation as a rebellion against the surrealist style that was dominating the cultural epoch. It embraced the entire field of abstract art amongst it’s many members, but prioritised the austere; geometric forms, mathematical compositions and reductively elegant shapes stood proudly in the face of the figurative subconscious. Yet Paalen, like many other members of the group, eventually succumbed to the allure of Surrealism and became a fully fledged member of the group. It was only once part of it’s fabric did he truly understand what it was he had rebelled against in the first place, finding the pseudo-religious, obsessively interior motifs of the surrealists as an insufficient way to true spirituality and enlightenment. He abandoned the group and spent years in exile in Mexico, pioneering a new, uniquely Paalen form of art that combined ideas of quantum theory with totemism, psycho-analysis and Marxist critique.

ANDRÉ MASSON

In a long life, Masson made time for everything. A pioneering surrealist, he was the most willing adopter of automatism, or the process of automatic drawing where the hand is allowed to run unchained on the canvas with no conscious decisions affecting its movement. He pushed these ideas further still, scattering sand or mud onto a surface and letting the organic shapes it feel in guide the direction of his work. A young rebel of Surrealism, he plumbed the depths of his subconscious until he, reaching the bottom, sought out structure once again. By the end of the war, having survived active duty and sharing a studio with Joan Míro, he abandoned the Surrealists and his work became structured, often depicting scenes of violence or eroticism. Condemned by obscenity laws under Nazi rule, he fled to America where he became a fatherly figure to the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, until he returned to France to paint landscapes. In the evening of his life, he returned to a less disciplined form, retaining parts of all he had learned to produce moving, erotic works of the subconscious mind.

ANDRÉ DERAIN

While studying to be an engineer, André Derain attended a series of painting classes that would change the course of his life. He met Henri Matisse, who convinced Derain’s parents to let the young man abandon his engineering career and devote himself solely to painting, after his stint in the military. The two artists spent the first few years of the new century in each others company, and together they founded Fauvism, characterised by a wildness of form and vivid colors. Derain became one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the avant-garde, yet by the end of the decade, he had tired of the new and retreated into study of the Old Masters. His paintings became austere in their palettes and traditional in their compositions, and after military service in the first World War, Derain’s days of wildness were long behind him. The young rebel of the art world became the leader of a classicist revival and celebrated the world over for restrained paintings in the noble European traditions; assured, beautiful but deeply rooted into the past in an act of rejection of the very modernity he had helped begin.

GUSTAVE MOREAU

Salome danced for King Herod, and was rewarded with any gift that her heart desired. Spurred by her mother, who harboured open resentment towards John the Baptist for his public reprove of her marriage to the king, Salome requested the head of the imprisoned prophet. Herod, regretful but true to his word, obliged. The story appears twice in the bible, though Salome remains unnamed in both, and it became a subject of desire, obsession and inspiration for hundreds of artists through the renaissance to modernity who depicted Salome and the scene in paint, stone and pencil. None, however, were quite like Moreau’s. In a setting of pure, indulgent opulence, where both the background and the figures are adorned in ornamentation and luxury, John’s head appears not on a platter but as an apparition, floating in a halo of light and gold as thick, rich blood drips from his neck. It is a deeply surreal scene, both erotic and disturbing in which we cannot know whether the apparition is a shared hallucination, a real appearance or purely the vision of Salome herself. 

LYONEL FEININGER

The human becomes landscape, as mountains emerge from the angles of her face and folds of her clothes. The chaise longue she reclines upon take on the tones of earthliness while the drapes and walls behind her become a sky, framing the subject in her duality. The subject, Julia, is Feininger’s wife and this is perhaps his most intimate study of her. A New York born artist of German heritage, as a teenager Feininger was sent to Hamburg to study where he was introduced to an burgeoning avant-garde movement that was sweeping Europe. Profoundly influenced by cubism, but not a member of the close-knit group of artists who developed it, he brought the ideas and philosophies of this new style back to America. This merged with an American optimism and a German romanticism to create a style distinctly his own, one which pays homage to the contemporary European scene and the modern styles of the day, while speaking to a spiritual love of his partner and the natural world that seem to blend into one before his eyes.

CHAIM SOUTINE

As German bombs fell on Paris, artists scattered to safety. Soutine, Amadeo Modigliani, and their dealer Leopold Zborowski fled to the south of France where they stayed for three years in the small town of Céret, a sharp contrast to the metropolitan life they had been used to in the capital. But the town proved invigorating for the group, and Soutine executed a series of turbulent landscapes that are at once beautiful and fearful, reflecting his exiled state and the prevalent sadness of the ensuing war. Violence seeps into every brushstroke and landscapes of the pastoral, rolling hills and thick woodlands come alive with a feeling of war. Here, a group of trees obscuring a town in the distance curl up like flames, moving with erratic freedom that engulfs the surrounding landscape. Background and foreground collapse into one as the view seems to morph into torment. In retreat, Soutine found peace in the land but none in his mind and his art reflected this duality, creating some of the most disquieting works of his career and showing how the pains of war seep into everything.

MARK TOBEY

A mystic of the west coast and sage of Seattle, the paintings speak of a metaphysical oneness that can be achieved through art, faith and creation. Mark Tobey’s work cannot be understood outside of his prescription to the Baháʼí Faith, a spiritual religion that believes in the unity of all people outside of faith, nationality, race, or sex. All major religions are unified in their core beliefs, according to Bahá’i, but divergent in their social practices and interpretations and the world can only be prosperous when these groups come together. Tobey took up this faith in the early 1900s while travelling across Japan and China, where he also learnt traditional calligraphy and brushstroke styles. He pioneered ‘all-over’ painting, where the artwork is removed from the confines or composition and each inch is as valuable as the next, with no centre of information anywhere. Predating Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists who were deeply inspired by Tobey, his works reward deep looking that enters you into a world of remarkable peacefulness. 

JEAN-SIMÉON CHARDIN

In an era of grandeur, Chardin turned his talents to the mundane. Large, dramatic historical scenes were prized by the academic painters of his contemporary France, and shown across the country by institutions who saw the past as an essential subject matter of value. The works were large, depicting battles, mythologies, and morals meant to stir patriotism and contemplation. Chardin rejected this idea not just in the size of his works, far smaller in scale and presentation, but in his compositional choices and the very scenes he chose to depict. Considered one of the greatest still-life painters of his generation, he was equally regarded in his genre scenes that showed maids, chefs, and the ‘back-of-house’ kept private from the eyes of the aristocracy and artistic elite. His paintings show daily life, paying respect to duty and to labour by depicting it with care and diligence. The scenes are not dramatic, though they are compositionally immaculate, but the figures are beautiful and the reverence to his subjects is clear in each brushstroke.

FERNAND LÉGER

Léger’s paintings are not abstract. Though they do not seek to imitate life, they create an equivalence to it, a modern view of a modern matter that reveals truth and accuracy in it’s portrayal with each deepening look. Years working in the French Engineer Corps during the war introduced the artist to the cutting edge of technology and mechanisation, and he understood that modernity was most readily expressed through these mediums. Léger saw an inevitability to the confluence of man and technology, as modern advancements changed the look of the world, so too would they change the make up of humans and his paintings are more accurate to the experience of burgeoning modernity than any photorealistic work. The men if the left of this painting disappear into the cogs and machines, inseparable and indistinguishable from the metal that moves around them, save for their pronounced greyness in the face of bright colours. The war had only just ended and Léger did not see the world he depicted as a utopia, he saw it simply as a state of the present, and of things to come.

PAUL CÉZANNE

In Metamorphoses by Ovid, amongst the greatest of the Roman poets, the story of Leda and the swan is one of consensual eroticism. This is at odds with other accounts of the myth, where the level of consent in the relationship differs wildly, though all see Zeus take the shape of a swan and have sexual relations with Leda that result in children. Yet it was Ovid’s telling that took up favour in the Renaissance. This was not least because the depiction of erotic acts between humans was firmly forbidden and so the Roman story was a suitable vehicle for artists to express a human sexuality otherwise forbidden by the church. Cézanne, some centuries removed from this vogue, choses the same subject matter and for much the same reason. The most explicitly erotic paintings of his oeuvre, his rendering of Leda and the Swan is overtly sensual, with Leda’s hips turned towards the viewer and the swan wrapping around her wrist as his wings rise. Yet the painting speaks to classicism, and its eroticism is well dressed in a literary academia and rich in aesthetic value, Cézanne’s loose brushstrokes and subtle colours bringing a melancholy, erotic beauty to the scene that, nonetheless, feels a weight of historical context.

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

In tumultuous waters, Christ’s disciples wrestle with their fishing boat to gain central back from the heavy storm that confronts them. They pull at the sails, adjust the rigging in anxious actions while others cower and hold on for dear life. One figure vomits overboard while another, a hidden self-portrait of the artist, looks directly at the viewer with a fearful gaze. Only Christ, bathed in unnatural light despite an otherwise accurately observed scene, remains calm, and his disciples gather around and look to him for salvation and hope. The scene is true to the Bible in most ways, depicting the titular story when the scared disciples woke Jesus in a panic as their fishing boat faced imminent danger, only for him to calm the storm with his commands and reprimand the disciples for their lack of faith. It is the earliest painting by Rembrandt, and his only seascape, despite a vogue for the motif in his contemporary Netherlands. That Rembrandt chose this story for such a significant painting is telling – he is a disciple regaining faith, aware of the battle ahead but sure that his artwork can calm any storm he faces.

HENRI MATISSE

One of the foundational pillars of early modernism, Matisse’s monumental canvas ‘The Joy of Life’ contains within it the past, the present, and the future. The past, in its lush pastoral setting and compositional similarities to an Italian Renaissance print by the great Agostino Carracci and an earlier Flemish painting by Paolo Fiammingo. The present, in its spatial distortions, flattening of dimensions and cadmium colours that rejected the conservative malaise of the day, causing outrage and offence when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. Together with Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’, it created a new language of European painting that came to define the art history of the 20^th Century. And the future, for within the painting is the origins of another of Matisse’s masterpieces. In the centre, furthest from the viewer, is a group of dancers who, three years later, would take centre stage in Matisse’s most well-known work ‘The Dance’. Matisse hid one seminal work inside another, anticipating the direction that he and the European artistic canon would move.

WILLIAM GLACKENS

Painting at a time when the conventions of aesthetic beauty were tightly controlled by institutional forces, Glackens, along with a group of 7 artist who together were known as ‘The Eight’, defied convention to highlight their own understanding of beauty. Informed by European impressionism, they focused on realist and gritty scenes of urban life, especially in New York where most were based, to rail against the conservatism that dominated the American painterly movement at the time. Painted when the artist was 38, this self-portrait presents the artist with a knowing gaze, each brushstroke seemingly moving in a different direction to the last so that the painter’s hand is evident in every square inch of the canvas. It is, in some ways, a rallying cry against the vogue of the day, more energetic portrayals of life and a celebration of the inelegance and imperfection of existence than with the modernist techniques of the day.

FRANCIS PICABIA

Starting in 1915, Francis Picabia began to paint portraits of his circle of friends as various machines and mechanical devises. Figures of the avant-garde circle became lamps, engine parts, pulleys and cameras, rendered in clinical diagrammatic lines and playful forms. By 1920, having completed hundreds of these unorthodox portraits known as Mechanomorphs, Picabia abandoned the straight edge precision and rigorous rationality of the series. Instead, the machine parts have melted down and morphed into free-form amorphous objects that resemble single cell organisms as much as they do production line objects. Rendered in metallic silver paint and slick enamel, the means of production still speak to the factory, even if the objects they depict do not. The title too moves the portraits away from the knoweable and into the fantastic imaginary, the unique eunuch an almost impossible figure of Picabia’s creation. Replete with wit as his works were, this painting also features the hallmark of Machine Co., an invented corporation that pokes fun at the natural form of the shapes on display and the overtly human hand present in their creation.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

More than eight hundred canvases were left in the artist’s studio after his death, in various stages of completion, and this was one of them. Cut from a larger study that contained multiple variations of a similar composition, this small rectangular still life was mounted alone as a work worthy of its own frame. The fruit seems almost alive, so ripe and ready to eat that each individual fig and apple casts a halo of freshness around itself as if inviting the viewer to reach through the oil and grab it. All of which is in sharp contrast to the dainty porcelain of the bowl in the middle, the handles protruding with delicacy outwards to the scene of objects it cannot hold. When Renoir painted this work, his arthritis had become debilitating and his technique was a world away from the one he had used as a young man. The vivid and broad brushstrokes came not, initially, from aesthetic choice but from necessity as it changed his visual language to one he was physically able to achieve. Yet the strange paradox at the heart of it seems to be that as Renoir aged, his works took on a vitality and virility that imbues them with youth and energy far above any of his earlier paintings.

GUSTAVE DORÉ

“Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea!”, so speaks the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s epic poem from 1798. A tale of desolation, horror, isolation and despair, its words on issues of faith, morality, and the very nature of man inspired artists from the moment it was published and continue to do so to this day. It is unsurprising then, that Gustave Doré, the most celebrated printmaker and illustrator of his day, chose Coleridge’s work, alongside Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ and Cervante’s ‘Don Quixote’, as a text to illustrate. His wood engravings, printed in stark blacks, capturing the pervading sense of danger and loneliness that seeps from every line of the poem. There is something uncomfortably peaceful about the impending doom of this image, the riotous sea dissolving into delicate fractals as the boat is held suspended atop a wave, illuminated by the sharp white of moonlight atop the crests. Doré captures the essence of the poem in his images, transforming wood and ink into lyrical works that plunder the depths of our soul.

HENRI MATISSE

On a visit to French-ruled Morocco, Matisse spent time in the Rif mountains and met the native tribes who lived there. As was so often the case with works made during colonialism, Matisse depicted this tribesman with an obsessive sense of ‘exoticism’, which comes through clearer in this work than any attempt at showing the truth of the man he painted. The bright colours and composition speak to faraway lands and a sense of unknowable mystery exudes from the canvas – capturing a traveller’s sense of the country as a magical place but one not wholly grounded in the reality of local existence. Yet the work is beautiful, and the tribesman fills the frame from top to bottom; he is bigger than the confines of Matisse’s canvas, his head and feet spilling over the tops of the work. He gazes, almost confrontationally, at the viewer, and with no external adornment we have no option but to meet his eyeline, admire his garb and revel in the glory of his stature.

MAURICE DENIS

As a child, Maurice Denis had only two passions – religion and art. It seemed clear to him that his path was to combine the two, to follow in the footsteps of the great Renaissance monk-cum-artist Fra Angelo and make religious art that elevated the holy in the minds of men. Yet, before this work was painted he was in a period of deep questioning, having co-founded the Nabi group the same year he found himself surrounded by the decadence and debauchery of the artists studio, and reluctantly drawn to it. Art and religion seemed, for the first time in his life, at odds with each other and it was only in the process of creating this work, and others in the series, that he unified the Cloister and the Studio in his mind. “I believe”, he said, “that art must sanctify nature; I believe that vision without the Spirt is vain; and it is the mission of the aesthete to erect beautiful things into immutable icons”.

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

Born into aristocracy but shunned for his disabilities, Toulouse-Lautrec retreated into the underbelly of society, and shone a light on the darkness of glamour at the heart of Paris. In the Cabaret shows that he frequented, alongside a group of outcasts, hustlers, performers and runaways, one of the performers sung stories of the character Rosa La Rouge. A murderous prostitute who tormented Paris, this fictional figure became embedded in Toulouse-Lautrec’s mind and he painted her here, using his favourite model Carmen Gaudin. He works like a filmmaker, capturing her in movement and motion, her hair obscuring her eyes and a sharp chin that points outward menacingly. There is little judgement in the oil, but nor is there celebration; his imagined image of this maligned figure is treated with dignity and respect. The painting hung in the same nightclub that the Cabarets featuring La Rouge were performed in, the large scale of the work haunting the venue like a spectre.

CLAUDE MONET

Monet put himself in the picture and broke a cardinal rule of the movement he had created. Though Impressionism did not attempt to replicate life, it valued the subjective truth of observation above all else, with an intense focus on light and colour to portray the titular ‘impression’ of the scene being painted. Here, Monet works en plein air, the act of painting outdoors, to capture the soft hues of the Siene in situ, playing with the light so exactly that we can sense the hour of the day in which he was painting. These works were not unusual in his oeuvre, his Siene paintings are numerous and the studio boat depicted was purchased by him in order to allow him to get greater views from which to execute a greater number of these works. Yet, in this painting, Money depicts himself in the studio boat he paints, betraying his observation with a depiction he could only imagine. He places himself in the centre of the scene, emphasising the creative role of the artist and the autonomy of painting as an act made by the individual.

JOAN MIRO

Abstract screams ring across a smoky landscape. Bright colors try to break through, being choked by darkness that swirl around them leaving only the ghost of their presence behind. The figures reveal little of their origin, anthropomorphic shapes that exist in a nether-world of nature, changing species with each observation – save for the unmistakable mouth of a human that forms the central focus of this work. She is a woman, and she screams towards the sky in desperation in agony as the bombs of the Spanish civil war fall around her. Picasso had revealed Guernica, his masterpiece in protest of the same war, the previous year, and the pose of Miró’s screaming women matches almost perfectly that of a horse in the right of Picasso’s work. An almost unclassifiable artist, Miró’s work veered between surrealism, fauvism, and expressionism but remained always uniquely his own. Often childlike and plumbing the depths of his subconscious, this work oozes with a tragedy and darkness quite unusual for the artist known for his playful, witty works.

JOSEPHINUS AUGUSTUS KNIP

For three years, the Dutch painter Josephus Augustus Knip lived in Rome, and would frequently travel around Italy to visit sites of historical importance and natural beauty. He painted watercolours during this time, and made constant sketches of his surroundings, depicting the soaring Italian landscape and the crumbling beauty of its ancient structures. Having worked as the court artist for Napoleon III, these Italian works were modest in comparison to his previous oeuvre, being prepared and finished on card, paper and panels, and being executed exclusively in pencil and watercolour. Yet, when he returned to the Netherlands, he used these sketches to paint more soaring, significant works such as this. The landscape depicted here is imaginary, yet grounded in pure observation. Knip collapses hundreds of miles and thousands of years into a single painting, depicting the coastline of Naples, with the island of Ischia and the volcano Epomeo in the background, but incorporates the ruins of buildings in Rome and rural Italy, with the remnants of the coliseum on the left and Nero’s aqueducts in the middle. It is an ode to the country in a simple square, a flattening of time and place into pure, joyous aesthetics.

GIACOMO BALLA

While his contemporaries depicted their ideas of movement through violence, machines, and the violence of machines, Balla explored it with a lightness of touch, a sense of beauty and whimsy in the word and a pervading witticism. A leading Italian Futurist, a movement which as the name suggests was concerned with the dynamism of the hyper-modern, it’s speed, youth, automation and movement, Balla embraced the central philosophies of the movement while implicitly rejecting the sanctioned approach. He instead saw modernity as not something to be feared, not something lacking humanity in the face of machines but instead found the idiosyncrasies of the everyday experience and depicted them through the cerebral ideas of the contemporary age. In his depiction of numbers, Balla brought the warmth of the human and the beauty of imperfection to the great signifiers of rationality and objectivity. His title is revealing, by bringing mathematics into art, it not only helps the latter but makes the former pleasing, freeing them from the confines of their need for perfection.