Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973)

He was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his
adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for
co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage,
and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are
the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the
bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War

Guernica

In 1937, Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized painting
displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair. It has since become the twentieth century’s
most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today.

What can we see?

Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin
to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body
of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting.

To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst
the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a
broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping
and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in
pain, its side pierced by a spear.
On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the
scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp,
while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their
faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a
large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. One of the most important
canvases of the twentieth century, Picasso’s great breakthrough painting.

It marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked
women composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African
masks.

The compressed space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards, while a slice of melon in
the still life at the bottom of the composition teeters on an upturned tabletop. Picasso unveiled the
monumental painting in his Paris studio after months of revision. The Avignon of the work’s title is a
reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels.

It was constructed in response to several significant sources. First amongst these was his confrontation
with Cézanne’s great achievement at the posthumous retrospective mounted in Paris a year after the
artist’s death in 1907.
Picasso has been likened to a “creative vacuum cleaner,” sucking up every new idea that he came
across. While that analogy might be a little coarse, it is fair to say that he had an enormous creative
appetite. One of several historical sources that Picasso pillaged is archaic art, demonstrated very clearly
by the left-most figure of the painting, who stands stiffly on legs that look awkwardly locked at the knee.

Her right arm juts down while her left arm seems dislocated (this arm is actually a vestige of a male
figure that Picasso eventually removed).

Her head is shown in perfect profile with large almond shaped eyes and a flat abstracted face. She
almost looks Egyptian.

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954)

He was raised in the small industrial town of Bohain-en-Vermandois in northern France. His family
worked in the grain business. As a young man, Matisse worked as a legal clerk and then studied for a law
degree in Paris from 1887 to 1889

Henri Matisse, regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of
the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of color throughout his career.
His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the
treatment.

Woman with a Hat

Woman with a Hat (La femme au chapeau) is a painting by Henri Matisse. An oil on canvas, it depicts
Matisse's wife, Amelie. It was painted in 1905.

Femme au chapeau marked a stylistic change from the regulated brushstrokes of Matisse's earlier work
to a more expressive individual style. His use of non-naturalistic colors and loose brushwork, which
contributed to a sketchy or "unfinished" quality, seemed shocking to the viewers of the day.

The artist's wife, Amélie, posed for this half-length portrait. She is depicted in an elaborate outfit with
classic attributes of the French bourgeoisie: a gloved arm holding a fan and an elaborate hat perched
atop her head. Her costume's vibrant hues are purely expressive, however; when asked about the hue of
the dress Madame Matisse was actually wearing when she posed for the portrait, the artist allegedly
replied, "Black, of course."

Initially, this painting was considered offensive by critics when it was displayed in Paris in 1905. The
painting was criticized for usage of multiple non-natural colors to depict woman’s face that gave it a
mask-like appearance. Matisse’s Woman with a Hat combines pointillist color with post impressionistic
technique. Woman with a Hat was a revolutionary piece of artwork as it challenged the way art was
viewed by the critics and the viewers.

Claude Monet
Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 –
December 5, 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific
practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as
applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting
Impression, Sunrise.

Water Lilies
Claude Monet began painting his Water Lilies series in 1897. As the storm of WWI raged around him in
Europe, Monet sat near his water gardens, painting his aquatic plants in various states of bloom, his
Japanese-style bridge, and the long hanging willow branches, reaching for the pond waters below.

The focal point of these paintings was the artist’s beloved flower garden, which featured a water garden
and a smaller pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. In his first water-lily series (1897–99), Monet
painted the pond environment, with its plants, bridge, and trees neatly divided by a fixed horizon.

Over time, the artist became less and less concerned with conventional pictorial space. By the time he
painted Water Lilies, which comes from his third group of these works, he had dispensed with the
horizon line altogether. In this spatially ambiguous canvas, the artist looked down, focusing solely on the
surface of the pond, with its cluster of vegetation floating amid the reflection of sky and trees. Monet
thus created the image of a horizontal surface on a vertical one.

These paintings, which Monet referred to as his 'water landscapes' became the focus of his entire life,
spending much of his last 30 years alive working diligently on them, not even slowing down when his
eyesight began to weaken due to the onset of cataracts in 1912.

The Waterlilies series, with all it's different colors and lighting make it an excellent selection of paintings
that are ideal for those looking to buy art for their own homes. The purples, blues and greens make his
original paintings ideal as art print reproductions, stretched canvases, handmade oil paintings, giclee
prints and posters.
Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands. He was a post-Impressionist
painter whose work — notable for its beauty, emotion and color — highly influenced 20th-century art.
He struggled with mental illness and remained poor and virtually unknown throughout his life .

In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no
formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially .

He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and
Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.

Van Gogh's art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to
be his first masterpiece, "Potato Eaters."

On March 17, 1901, 71 of van Gogh's paintings were displayed at a show in Paris, and his fame grew
enormously. His mother lived long enough to see her son hailed as an artistic genius. Today, Vincent van
Gogh is considered one of the greatest artists in human history

The Starry Night

The curving, swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky, the brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows, the
large, flame-like cypress trees, and the thickly layered brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry
Night are engrained in the minds of many as an expression of the artist’s turbulent state-of-mind.

Van Gogh’s canvas is indeed an exceptional work of art, not only in terms of its quality but also within
the artist’s oeuvre, since in comparison to favored subjects like irises, sunflowers, or wheat fields, night
landscapes are rare. Nevertheless, it is surprising that The Starry Night has become so well known. Van
Gogh mentioned it briefly in his letters as a simple “study of night” or” night effect.”

Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night" in the asylum where he was staying in Saint-Rémy, France, in 1889,
the year before his death. “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before
sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” he wrote to his brother Theo.

Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.

Died August 11, 1956, East Hampton, New York.

He was an American painter who was a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement
characterized by the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes referred to as “action painting.”

During his lifetime he received widespread publicity and serious recognition for the radical poured, or
“drip,” technique he used to create his major works.
He is also one of the first American painters to be recognized during his lifetime and after as a peer of
20th-century European masters of modern art.

In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in
1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months.

After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the
modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente
Orozco.

Number 5
Number 5, 1948 is a painting by Jackson Pollock, an American painter known for his contributions to the
abstract expressionist movement.

The painting was done on an 8' x 4' sheet of fiberboard, with thick amounts of brown and yellow paint
drizzled on top of it, forming a nest-like appearance.

It was originally owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art
before being sold to David Geffen and then allegedly to David Martinez in 2006 (though the supposed
sale of this painting to Martinez has been denied by his attorneys).

In No. 5, 1948 specifically, viewers can see Pollock’s use of black, white, grey, red, and yellow
overlapping in layers that interweave and cover the entire surface area.

The movement is constant, pooling in larger spots and exploding in multiple directions at once. Although
the colors are simple, the directions and conscious way in which Pollock applied them creates an
emotional flow through the lines. Recently, scholars have shown that Pollock’s angles and implied
motions display mathematical precision.

The drip painting techniques used here were found in Pollock's career from 1947 to 1950, which was a
prolific and prominent time in his career. This finish involved a combination of pouring and activity
afterwards, with the artist characteristically being bent down over the canvas on the floor, where he
tended to feel most comfortable and in tune with his canvas

Piet Mondrian
Born :7 March 1872, Amersfoort, Netherlands

Died: 1 February 1944, Manhattan, New York, United States.

Piet Mondrian is a Dutch artist best known for his abstract paintings.

As well as abstract art Mondrian was also passionate about dancing! Apparently he didn't like slow
traditional dances like waltzes or tango, but enjoyed high energy, fast dancing styles! He even called one
of his abstract paintings Broadway Boogie Woogie after a popular dance of the time.

When Mondrian made his paintings, he would always mix his own colors, never using the paint directly
out of a tube. He often used primary colors – red yellow and blue – as in this painting

Mondrian did not use a ruler to measure out his lines! He thought carefully about where to place the
lines, like those that you see in this painting. Notice how the red, yellow and blue are placed to the side
and the center of painting doesn't have any color. Mondrian often used color and composition in this
way. (A composition is the arrangement of shapes and images in a picture).
Although he is best known for his abstract paintings made from squares and rectangles, Piet Mondrian
started out painting realistic scenes. He especially liked painting trees

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1943) was one of the final paintings Piet Mondrian created before he died.

In Broadway Boogie Woogie, Mondrian represents the restless motion of the city. Move the button
underneath the painting from right to left to remove the hue (color), without altering the luminance
(brightness).

As you move the pink knob above, what disappears? The yellow and gray areas (gray squares), easily
distinguished in the colored image, cannot be distinguished in the black-and-white image. Thus, the
yellow and gray areas have been painted with the same luminance (brightness).

We distinguish adjacent objects if they have different levels of brightness. Our brains cannot position the
yellow and gray areas accurately in the painting because they have the same brightness. That is the
origin of the jittery motion we seem to see in the painting.

Austere in some ways, chaotic in others, the painting is simultaneously an image of movement and a
picture of energy brought to rest. Mondrian considered it a masterpiece—a perfect expression of his
intellectual theories. For decades, he had attempted to create a universal visual language capable of
abstractly communicating the spirit of the Modern Age. He had methodically pared the formal elements
of art down to color, shape, and line, and then pared those elements down further to primary colors,
rectangles and squares, and horizontal and vertical lines. His work was both creative and destructive—
its aim was to destroy the reliance painters put on figurative subjects by creating a style based on a
deeper truth.

Said Mondrian, “I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything
until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.” With “Broadway Boogie Woogie” he achieved that
goal. He painted a picture of the essence of something real—the lights, energy, and architecture of
Broadway—while also distilling that subject into a completely abstract manifestation of a feeling. To
him, it was a triumph. And to many of his contemporaries, it was the beginning point for the
development of a multitude of other conceptual and theoretical advancements, many of which continue
to exert a tremendous influence on abstract art today

Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983)

He did works in sculpture, painting, and worked as a ceramist. Born in the seaport city of Barcelona,
much of his work was influenced by the scenic seaside town, and the distinct style that he found in the
area

1976, the Joan Miro Foundation Center of Contemporary Arts was opened in the city of Barcelona,
which was his home city, and where he would often return for his inspirations. In 1979, four years after
this opened, he was also named the Doctor Honoris Causa, by the University of Barcelona, for the work
he had done, as well as his influence on art.

Not only did Miro take a distinct approach to creation, but he also focused on a number of mediums and
forms during his career. This has made Joan Miro one of the most celebrated Spanish artists, and one
who has created a unique style which many followed years after his death in 1983. Along with The
Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, and The Son of Man by Rene Magritte, Joan Miro's The Tilled
Field and Harlequin's Carnival become the iconic images of Surrealism Movement.

Spanish Dancer
Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil was an Indian painter who revolutionized modern Indian art.

Date of Birth: January 30, 1913

Place of Birth: Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary

Date of Death: December 5, 1941

She is also considered as a revolutionary woman artist and the originator of modern art in India. Though
her artworks mainly depicted Western style and culture during the initial stages of her career, the
painter gradually began to rediscover herself by depicting Indian subjects using traditional methods.

Apart from painting, she was also well-versed in playing piano and fond of reading. She even travelled to
different parts of India, France and Turkey and managed to incorporate ideas gained from different
techniques into her own works.

Throughout her career, she painted her friends, lovers and also made quite a few self-portraits, for
which she is often considered as a narcissistic by many. of Death: Lahore, British India

Legacy
Amrita Sher-Gil is often considered as the pioneer of modern art in the country as her works influenced
and inspired a number of modern day greats. India Post released a stamp of her painting 'Hill Women' in
the year 1978. There is a road named after the painter in Lutyen's Delhi, known as the Amrita Shergil
Marg. Budapest’s Indian cultural center has been named after her. In 2013, the 100th anniversary of her
birth was declared as the international year of Amrita Sher-Gil by UNESCO. Many plays and novels
including Salman Rushdie's ‘The Moor's Last Sigh’ were inspired by her.

Bride's Toilet

During her short life, she was able to create some of the most beautiful pieces of modern Indian art. She
perfectly blends the old and the new, as well as European and Indian sensibilities. This is apparent in her
painting "Bride's Toilet."
This painting was inspired by the traditional Ajanta murals and was part of the artist's South Indian
trilogy. It features a large group of figures composed of three women and two children. One of the
women has different feature and is painted in a different shade than the others, making her stand out
among the rest of the group. With such emphasis put on her, it's clear that she's the bride being
referred to in the title

Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí, in full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech, (born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain—died
January 23, 1989, Figueras), Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of
subconscious imagery.

Once Dalí hit on that method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to
1937 he produced the paintings which made him the world’s best-known Surrealist artist.

He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise
metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed those objects in meticulous, almost
painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of
his Catalonian homeland.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more-academic style under the influence of the
Renaissance painter Raphael. His ambivalent political views during the rise of fascism alienated his
Surrealist colleagues, and he was eventually expelled from the group. Thereafter, he spent much of his
time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry as well as exhibiting his genius
for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955.

Perhaps the most famous of those enigmatic images is The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which limp
melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape.

The Persistence of Memory

The Meaning of Salvador Dali's Melting Clocks Painting

Sometimes referred to as just the "clocks" painting, in Dali's Persistence of Memory (1931) a mysterious
human-like white figure sleeps in an otherwise deserted landscape. A clock covers the sleeping figure's
back, almost the way a blanket might cover a sleeping child. Another clock is hung over a limb like a wet
piece of laundry hung out to dry. Unlike the clocks we use and are surrounded with every day, Dali's
clocks are not flat and hard, but are bent out of shape and seem to be soft, melting away in the desert
sun.

Salvador Dali Soft Clocks Meaning, Einstein & Relativity

Some art scholars believe that Dali's melting clocks may symbolize Albert Einstein's groundbreaking
Theory of Relativity, a new and revolutionary idea back in the 1930s. Through the theory of relativity,
Einstein proposed a new concept of time as being relative and complex — not something fixed and
easily tracked with as crude a gadget as a pocket watch. In Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali shows
the flaccid clocks melting away and thus losing their power over the world around them. Through his
melting clocks, Salvador Dali might suggest that our current time-keeping devices are primitive, old-
fashioned and even impotent in this post-Einstein world.

Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by
the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk
art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.
Wikipedia

Born: 6 July 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico

Died: 13 July 1954, Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico

The Two Fridas, 1939 by Frida Kahlo

This painting was completed shortly after her divorce with Diego Rivera. This portrait shows Frida's two
different personalities. One is the traditional Frida in Tehuana costume, with a broken heart, sitting next
to an independent, modern dressed Frida. In Frida's diary, she wrote about this painting and said it is
originated from her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. Later she admitted it expressed her
desperation and loneliness with the separation from Diego

In this painting, the two Fridas are holding hands. They both have visible hearts and the heart of the
traditional Frida is cut and torn open. The main artery, which comes from the torn heart down to the
right hand of the traditional Frida, is cut off by the surgical pincers held in the lap of the traditional Frida.
The blood keeps dripping on her white dress and she is in danger of bleeding to death. The stormy sky
filled with agitated clouds may reflect Frida's inner turmoil.

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose
work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He was careful about his use of the term
Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Wikipedia

Born: 28 July 1887, Blainville-Crevon, France

Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

NUDE DESENDING A STAIRCASE

He positioned the figure—its upright stance reiterated by the vertical orientation of the canvas—in a
descending diagonal from upper left to lower right.

A tangle of shattered geometric shapes suggest the stairs in the lower left corner of the composition
while rows of receding stairs at the upper left and right frame the strangely multiplying female form as
she descends. But what a descent! The figure recalls the whirling of a robot promenading down a set of
stairs as if in some sort of futurist movie, or perhaps a magic lantern show—a popular form of image
projection in the years before the development of cinema.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 is a painting in oil on a 147 x 89.2cm canvas which depicts a nude
figure in movement, supposedly descending a staircase. The figure is fragmented and made up of
abstract, geometrical parts, which fuse together to depict the stages of movement. In the background,
we see the staircase depicted in darker colors. At the bottom of the composition, Duchamp indicated
the title in french: “Nu descendant un escalier”.

René Magritte,
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose
work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He was careful about his use of the term
Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Wikipedia

Born: 28 July 1887, Blainville-Crevon, France

Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

The Treachery of Images

Paintings; scrolls

Oil on canvas

23 3/4 × 31 15/16 × 1 in.

Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (78.7)

Modern Art

René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter created The Treachery of Images when he was 30 years old.

Magritte loved word games. He was also determined to prove that the painting and poetry were on an
equal footing despite the Surrealists’ constant flaunting on the pre-eminence of the written word.
Magritte caches the gap between the language and the meaning. His statement is taken to mean that
the painting itself is not a pipe; it is merely an image of a pipe.
Magritte explained it: “It’s quite simple. Who would dare pretend that the REPRESENTATION of a pipe IS
a pipe? Who could possibly smoke the pipe in my painting? No one. Therefore it IS NOT A PIPE.”

His point was that even if paintings are representational, they are only a symbol of the thing they
represent. This may seem obvious, but it’s pretty clever way to address the semiotic gap between the
visual and the verbal, and makes you think twice about the relationship we have with images. In true
Surrealist fashion, Magritte is questioning the terms of reality we mostly take for granted. A picture of a
thing is…not that thing! We make the connection ourselves, and Magritte and his dream-obsessed
homies were attempting to disrupt that process, or at least make us more aware of how it works.

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract
expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. His paintings are existential in tone
and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and
contingency. Wikipedia

Born: 29 January 1905, New York, New York, United States

Died: 4 July 1970, New York, New York, United States

Onement, I 1948

Medium

Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas

Dimensions

27 1/4 x 16 1/4" (69.2 x 41.2 cm)

The name "Onement" is an archaic derivation of the word "atonement", that means "the condition of
being made into one".

This painting is considered the breakthrough of Newman's work and the first complete incarnation of
what the artist will later call a "zip".

The canvas is almost completely colored in a dark brown tonality, but in the center, there is a straight
yellow line, unevenly painted, that vertically crosses the entire artwork.
This thin line is a "zip", a vertical band of color, and is a motif that frequently comes back in Newman's
paintings. A zip does not divide the canvas, but instead, it unifies the two sides of it. This thin yellow line
carries a sense of mystery and tries to draw the audience to experience the painting both emotionally
and physically.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent.
Rothko did not personally subscribe to any art movement, but he is generally identified as an abstract
expressionist. Wikipedia

Born: 25 September 1903, Daugavpils, Latvia

Died: 25 February 1970, New York, New York, United States

No. 3/No. 13 1949

Medium - Oil on canvas

No. 3/No. 13 is an early example of a compositional structure that Rothko would continue to explore for
more than two decades. Narrowly separated blocks of color hover against a colored ground. Their edges
are soft and irregular, so that when Rothko used closely related tones the blocks sometimes seem barely
to emerge from the ground. The green bar in No. 3/No. 13, on the other hand, appears to vibrate
against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker. In fact, the canvas is full of gentle movement, as
blocks emerge and recede and surfaces seem to breathe. Just as the edges tend to fade and blur, the
colors are never completely flat, and the faint unevenness in their intensity reveals the artist’s
exploration of the technique of scumbling: by planting bold colors on top of a haze of translucent layers
of paint, he created ambiguity, a shifting between solidity and impalpable depth.

The sense of boundlessness in Rothko’s paintings has been related to the aesthetics of the sublime, an
implicit or explicit concern of a number of his fellow painters in the New York School. The remarkable
color in his paintings was for him only a means to a larger end: “I’m interested only in expressing basic
human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom,” he said. “If you...are moved only by...color relationships,
then you miss the point.”

Artistic Techniques and Forms

An optical flicker appears to be created by the green bar against the Orange background, yet the edges
of the rectangular shapes blur and soften, too. Gentle movement, with blocks of color emerging and
receding, highlights this painting. A canvas masterpiece, the painting shows his strict attention to detail,
composition, depth, balance, color, and scale

Aguste Rodin

François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern
sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin
possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay.

Born: 12 November 1840, Paris, France

Died: 17 November 1917, Meudon, France

The Thinker

The Thinker, French Le Penseur, sculpture of a pensive nude male by French artist Auguste Rodin, one of
his most well-known works.

Many marble and bronze editions in several sizes were executed in Rodin’s lifetime and after, but the
most famous version is the 6-foot (1.8-metre) bronze statue (commonly called a monumental) cast in
1904 that sits in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris. The large muscular figure has captivated
audiences for decades in his moment of concentrated introspection.

The nude form is seated on a rock, his back hunched forward, brows furrowed, chin resting on his
relaxed hand, and mouth thrust into his knuckles. Still and pensive, he observes the twisting figures of
those suffering in the circles of Hell below. Some scholars suggest that the Poet was originally meant to
represent Dante, but the muscular and bulky form contrasts with typical sculptures that depict the poet
as slender and lithe.
Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose
work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He was careful about his use of the term
Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Wikipedia

Born: 28 July 1887, Blainville-Crevon, France

Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Fountain

ARTIST Marcel Duchamp 1887–1968

MEDIUM Porcelain

DIMENSIONS Unconfirmed: 360 × 480 × 610 mm

Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed
"R. Mutt".

Dimensions: 61 cm x 36 cm x 48 cm

Period: Dada
Fountain is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art.
The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition
purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Tate’s work is a 1964 replica and
is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is
reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp’s
Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ‘readymade’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the
artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp’s case, interpreted in some way

Kazimir Malevich supermatism

art movement, focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted
in a limited range of colors. It was founded by Kazimir Malevich in Russia, around 1913, and announced
in Malevich's 1915 exhibition in St. Petersburg where he exhibited 36 works in a similar style. The term
suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on
visual depiction of objects.

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 1915-16 // "In malevich's pictures the colored geometric figures,
completely reduced to the essentials, driven by some internal strength and impetus, detach themselves
from the horizontal picture plane to cut freely across the bright space at their disposal. Their soaring
liberation from the constraint of matter proclaims the freedom, creative strength and sovereignty of the
mind..." (passuth on Malevich: 24)
Umberto Boccioni (Italian, Reggio 1882–1916 Sorte

Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary
aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to
the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death.
Wikipedia

Born: 19 October 1882, Reggio Calabria, Italy

Died: 17 August 1916, Verona, Ital

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Date:1913, cast 1950

Medium: Bronze

Classification: Sculpture

The Futurists’ celebration of the fast pace and mechanical power of the modern world is emphasized
here in the sculpture’s dynamism and energy. The figure’s marching silhouette appears deformed by
wind and speed, while its sleek metal contours allude to machinery. World War I broke out the year
after Boccioni created this work. Believing that modern technological warfare would shatter Italy’s
obsession with the classical past, the Futurists welcomed the conflict. Tragically, Boccioni was killed in
action in 1916, at the age of thirty-four

unique Forms of Continuity in Space integrates trajectories of speed and force into the representation of
a striding figure. It does not depict a particular person at a specific moment, but rather synthesizes the
process of walking into a single body. For Boccioni, one of the key figures in the Italian Futurist
movement, this was an ideal form: a figure in constant motion, immersed in space, engaged with the
forces acting upon it.

Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a
member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th
century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Wikipedia

Born: 7 August 1867, Duchy of Schleswig

Died: 13 April 1956, Neukirchen, Germany

Prophet

1912

This brooding face confronts the viewer with an immediacy and deep emotion that leave no doubt
about the prophet's spirituality. His hollow eyes, furrowed brow, sunken cheeks, and solemn
countenance express his innermost feelings. Three years before Nolde executed this print, he had
experienced a religious transformation while recovering from an illness. Following this episode, he
began depicting religious subjects in paintings and prints, such as the image seen here

Constantin Brancusi (French (born Romania), Hobita 1876–1957 Paris)

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France.
Considered a pioneer of modernism, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century, Brâncuși
is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm
tools.

Born: 19 February 1876, Hobita, Romania

Died: 16 March 1957, Paris, France

Bird in Space
Date:1923

Medium: Marble

Classification: Sculpture

From the 1920s to the 1940s, the theme of a bird in flight preoccupied Brancusi. He concentrated on the
animals’ movement, rather than their physical attributes. In Bird in Space, the sculptor eliminated wings
and feathers, elongated the swell of the body, and reduced the head and beak to a slanted oval plane.
Balanced on a slender conical footing, the figure’s upward thrust appears unfettered. This sculpture is
part of a series that includes seven marble sculptures and nine bronze casts.

Henry Moore 1898–1986

Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract
monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Wikipedia

Born: 30 July 1898, Castleford, United Kingdom

Died: 31 August 1986, Perry Green, United Kingdom

Reclining Figure 1951

Reclining Figure is the original plaster sculpture from which a bronze cast was made for the Festival of
Britain in 1951. The making of the piece was recorded in a pioneering documentary on Moore made by
John Read for the BBC that year. The plaster sculpture remained in Moore’s possession until 1978 when
it was included in the artist’s gift of thirty-six sculptures to the Tate Gallery

This is a large plaster sculpture of a reclining figure resting on a rectangular wooden base. To make this
sculpture Moore first created a supportive armature onto which he applied successive layers of wet
plaster. A visible steel rod connecting the right hand to the body provides evidence that this armature
was made from iron (fig.1). Moore worked on the plaster with various tools as it set and dried before
finally abrading the surface to create a smooth finish

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived
and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on
his art. Giacometti was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Wikipedia

Born: 10 October 1901, Borgonovo, Bregaglia, Switzerland

Died: 11 January 1966, Chur, Switzerland

WALKING MAN I, 1960

Alberto Giacometti created a filiform and stylized figure, whose limbs seem to stretch out endlessly, as a
symbol of the human being. A combination both of strange fragility and strong determination is
expressed in this unrealistic figure.

Impenetrable yet disconcerting, Giacometti’s male figure has no individualized aspect; he is depicted
only with his strangely uneven skin. Because of the lack of specific identification on his face, this figure
exalts a universal impact which exerts an intriguing fascination on the spectator. Through this sculpture,
Giacometti managed to capture the decisive moment where a man reveals an internal strength which
stems from his own energy and momentum.

Alberto Giacometti’s walking man does not ask himself any questions; he simply comes from
somewhere and is on his way elsewhere. His gaze fixed on the horizon, he strides decisively, forward in
order to discover, to understand, as if he has a goal to pursue. With an awakened conscience, he travels
through time to observe the world. His feet, anchored in the ground, connect him inevitably to the earth
with which he is one. It is the whole body which here moves through an oblique force, towards a future
to be created.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art
that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

Born: 18 December 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland

Died: 29 June 1940, Muralto, Switzerlan

Tod und Feuer

The German word for death, Tod, makes up the features of the white face in the center of the picture,
so powerfully, yet simply reminiscent of a human or an animal skull. "Tod" may be found again in the "T"
shape of the figure's raised arm, the golden orb in its hand, and the D shape of its face. Perhaps a
minimally described man walks toward Death, or perhaps towards the glowing sun held in Death's hand.
The image juxtaposes the cold white with the warm reds and yellows, perhaps symbolic, like a kind of
cave painting, of the creation of man and the image of his sad mortality. Inspired by Klee's interest in
hieroglyphics, Death and Fire suggests that abstraction and representation have been mutually
accommodating, or otherwise complementary means of expression, since time immemorial.

His conception of death is teleological and is thus experienced as the continuous approach of an
inaccessible totality. At the same time it is a conception of the world here and the world beyond, a
gnostic tension that is very obvious here, but that could already be seen in a 1923 work called Angelus
Novus, which Walter Benjamin made into his personal mandala. It is also about the recognition of the
historical breaking points that take place in human development, that is the dissociation of humankind
and nature. The image in its totality is a symbol of funerary rites where the ferryman takes the dead to
another empire.

In 1940, the German expressionist Paul Klee painted "Tod und Feuer" ("Death and Fire"). Oil on
distemper on jute. With himself passing away on June 29 of the same year, it is today considered one of
his final masterpieces. Klee at this time suffered from an autoimmune disease known as scleroderma.
The disease heavily affected his joints and hardly allowed painless painting. Scleroderma is associated
with the development of autoantibodies, the most common ones being anti-nuclear antibodies, and
represents a typical example of a degenerative disease driven by necroinflammation