1

Picasso’s Guernica

Picassos’ ‘Guernica’ the painting created in 1937 is considered by many to be his greatest masterpiece. Painted as a reaction to the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, it shows the horror, cruelty and devastation of modern warfare. The painting contains a lot more than a depiction of war. Picasso explores many themes, love, death, nationhood, motherhood and his own life at that point in time. The painting is also full of cross references to the history of art, Picasso gives a nod to Rubens, Goya and Poussin and others. ‘Guernica’ has a history of its own, once it leaves Picasso’s studio, and its story continues. A painting worth spending some time to get to know a little better.

 

2

The Painters of the Cirque Medrano

The legendary Paris circus, from its beginning as the Cirque Fernando in 1875 (it was renamed the Cirque Medrano in 1897) until it’s closure in 1963 was an integral part of Parisian cultural life, attracting many writers, painters and poets who have created many works inspired by the Circus. Many painters of the 19th and 20th centuries captured the magic and sparkle and sometimes the hardship of circus life. The performers have been immortalised on canvas by Renoir, Degas, Lautrec, Seurat, Picasso and Leger among others. An intriguing look at the history of a circus through the eyes of the painters of the Montmartre

 

3

Brett Whiteley’s Lavender Bay

Brett Whiteley is one of Australia’s most admired painters. After spending the 1960s in London and New York Whiteley returned to Sydney in 1970 and made Lavender Bay his home. It was there that the artist created a body of work that is now regarded as his best. Habour landscapes, interiors and still life’s are a delicate combination of deep saturated colours and sensuous line. His work of this period is simultaneously sensual, erotic expressive, romantic and personal. Whiteleys work often shows an Eastern influence and reflect romantic ideas of man and nature, however, his works also shows the darker side of human life and the difficulties of the artists own personal story.

 

4

Manet, Painter of Modern Life

Edouard Manet is considered the godfather of Modern Art, a painter who rejected a future envisioned by his parents and became one of the most celebrated painters of his time. Known as a painter of modern life, not only did he depict the world in which he lived, he encapsulated it’s hopes and fears. For three decades Manet documented the life of Paris and its place in the modern world. He was a painter torn between rebelling against the established art world and yet he craved the recognition that being part of it would give him. Manet was a major influence on the Impressionist painters that followed him. A major artist who made painters view their art and the world in which they inhabited in new and interesting ways. A painter of great stature, who commands continuous appraisal.

 

5

Pauline Boty, Queen of Pop

Pauline Boty was one of the originators of British Pop Art. Boty’s paintings and collages often demonstrated a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality and expressed overt or implicit criticism of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, made her famous in her lifetime. But shortly after her untimely, early death she was soon forgotten. In recent times Pauline has been rediscovered and numerous retrospective exhibitions have been held. She is now rightly heralded as one of Britain’s most important artists of the Post-War period. As well as being a very talented painter, Boty also produced collages and stained glass, she was an actress of stage screen and television and a radio broadcaster. An artist of great and varied talent.

 

6

British Pop Art

Although the term Pop Art is usually associated with the work of artists working in New York and Los Angles in the 1960s, the movement actually found its earliest voice in Britain a decade earlier. From the early work of the ‘Independent Group’ in the mid 1950s Pop emerged to become the dominant style throughout the 1960s. A new generation of artists drew inspiration from their own lives or the things they saw around them every day. They took their influence from Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books. Many were horrified by the pop artists’ use of such ‘low’ subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. Pop took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism.

 

7

Picasso and Modern British Art

Picasso remains the twentieth century’s single most important artistic figure, a towering genius who changed the face of modern art. His influence on modern British Art is undoubtable, artists like Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and David Hockney have all been indebted to the works of Picasso. Each one of these artists had an epiphany moment when confronted by Picasso’s work. Throughout the 20th Century the shape shifting Spanish artist had an enduring influence on these major British Artists. We can see how each artist took from and then adapted Picasso’s work, to create their own unique versions of Modern British Art.

 

8

Post-War Australian Painting

Western Art from ‘Down Under’ is often overlooked and neglected, but there is a large amount of talented and inventive painters who rose to prominence in the post-World War 2 era. Painters like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd from the ‘Heidi School’ working in a naïve and expressive style, John Brack’s figurative paintings give a social critic of Australian post-war culture, John Olsen’s celebratory abstract expressions of the landscape, Brett Whiteley’s personal vision of his life in Sydney, Fred William’s landscapes and Jeffery Smart’s surreal depictions of urban life are all essential in our understanding and appreciating the modern art of Australia and it’s place in the history of Western Art.

 

9

Matisse, Simple Beauty

Matisse is regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century. His intense use of colour in his paintings between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (wild beasts). Matisse developed a rigorous style of decorative motifs and bold flat colours. During WW1 he moved from Paris to the South of France, here his work became more figurative and traditional and he was heralded as an upholder of the French Classical tradition. In later age he had a second flourish as an avant-garde artist and developed his cut-out style, using collage techniques with coloured paper. One of Matisse’s late works was the design and decoration of the Chapel at Rosaire de Vence, A truly important artist of the 20th Century and an inspiration to countless generations of painters that followed.

 

10

Kiki de Montparnasse, The Art of the Muse

Alice Prin, often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist's model, literary muse, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother.  By the age of fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors and painters. Adopting a single name, "Kiki", she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist's model, posing for dozens of artists.  Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She can be considered his muse at this time, she is the subject of some of his best-known images. She also appeared in nine short and often experimental films. A painter in her own right, in 1927 Prin had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Prin was also a singer, performing and recording through out the 1920s and 30s. Alice Prin remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. As her headstone says "Kiki, 1901–1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse."

 

11

Stanley Spencer, The Odd One Out

Spencer, an English painter working in the 20th Century, is considered a visionary and an eccentric, he was an independent artist that never joined any of the artistic movements of the time. Spencer's works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith, his romantic and sexual obsessions. Spencer was a commissioned War Artist in both WW1 and WW2. He was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions as seen in some of his greatest works including ‘Resurrection, Cookham’ ‘The Sandham Memorial Chapel’ and the Port Glasgow Series’. Spencer saw military service in WW1, had two unconventional marriages, was rejected on occasions by the Royal Academy, had an attempted prosecution for obscenity against him, all while living his entire life in a Berkshire village make his life as intriguing as his paintings.