Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Night Fishing at Antibes”, 1939, Oil on Canvas, 205.8 x 345.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Picasso spent the months just before the outbreak of the Second World War at Antibcs on the Mediterranean. Here he painted this large composition, which is an exception among his works.

At the center is a boat with two fishermen spearing fish by the light of two gas lamps. This central motif is framed by others: at the right we see two girls standing on the breakwater, one of the girls is holding onto her bicycle while licking an ice-cream cone. At the upper left we can recognize the old town of Antibes; in the center above there is a bright moon in the sky. The work displays a range of colors that has never before appeared in Picasso’s paintings: dark blues and violets are contrasted with various shades of green, and this curious dark triad is brightened by a few yellow accents – which gives it a ghost-like quality.

This painting is exceptional in Picasso’s work, both as a nocturnal scene and for its ghostly colors; it is also unusual in that the artist had rarely before attempted to combine figure and landscape – a combination which is particularly convincing here. The freedom of the composition is in curious contrast with the rigorous architecture of Guernica, so that at first sight the work seems a brilliant improvisation. But closer scrutiny reveals that it, too, has been carefully constructed and organized, and that in its details it recalls many earlier paintings. Like Three Musicians, this work sums up and at the same time marks the end of a period.

The Helsinki Central Railway Station

The Central Railway Station was designed by Eliel Saarinen in 1909 and the station was opened in 1919. The station is mostly clad in Finnish granite, and its distinguishing features are its clock tower and the two pairs of statues holding the spherical lamps, lit at night-time, on either side of the main entrance. The station is used by approximately 200,000 passengers per day, making it Finland’s most-visited building.

The four massive granite statues flank the entrance of Helsinki Central Railway Station. The “Stone Men” hold spherical lanterns that are lite at night. They are the work of a Finnish sculptor named Emil Wikström. He was a prolific and influential sculptor of monuments throughout Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his works were inspired by local mythodology and heritage.

Nicola Verlato

Paintings by Nicola Verlato

“I started being interested in CG since I first saw Tron in movie theaters, back in 1982. What struck me was the obvious similarity between that new way to create images and the one of the fifteenth-century perspective, it seemed to me that it was possible, on a new level of complexity, to pick back up from where the masters of the Renaissance left off. The problem was that there was no way for a seventeen-year-old painter to get in touch with what was, at that time, extremely expensive technology. Almost ten years passed before I was able to get my hands on a PC and a 3D program to work with. The use of computers didn’t change my approach to painting, it just expanded the scope of what I can introduce in the representations and how much control I have over it.

I can now virtually introduce any element of our world—engineering structures, complex architectures, design objects—into the painting, as well as controlling difficult foreshortening and the reconstruction of faces with the added possibility of animating them. The real world can be put once again into the painting and manipulated to create new narrations and icons.“ – Nicola Verlato

John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry, “The Flying Codonas”, 1932, Oil and Tempera on Panel, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

John Steuart Curry, born in Kansas in 1897, was an American painter whose career spanned from 1924 until his death in 1946. He was known, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth-century,

The Regionalist artists were concerned with rural nostalgia and the American heartland associated with the area west of the Mississippi River, mainly Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas. Regionalism was essentially a revolt against the centralization of the Industrial Revolution; however, it also included images of rugged, independent men surviving life’s natural disasters.

In 1916, Curry enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute but, after a month, transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago. He transferred once again to Pennsylvania’s Geneva College and graduated in 1921. Curry was employed as an illustrator until 1926, during which time he created illustrations for periodicals such as “Boys’ Life”, the “County Gentleman”, and “The Saturday Evening Post”. In 1932, Curry spent time traveling throughout the United States with the Ringling Brothers Circus. During this time, he painted many circus-themed paintings including his 1932 “The Flying Codonas”, a family trapeze act that was conceivably the greatest circus act in the first half of the twentieth-century.

In 1936, John Curry was appointed artist-in-residence at the College of Agriculture of the University of Wisconsin, which built him a small studio. He spent most of his time in the studio as he did not have classes to teach or any specific duties. This allowed him to freely travel throughout the state of Wisconsin and promote art and provide instructions to students.

Curry received commissions in 1936 for murals at the Department of Justice Building and the Main Interior Building in Washington D.C. He was elected in 1937 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Member and became a full Academician in 1943. After this, he received a commission for a series of murals on Kansas topics for the Kansas State Capitol at Topeka. The third of the series, “Tragic Prelude”, depicting John Brown in front of troops killing each other, was considered too controversial to be installed. Curry was devastated and refused to sign the two completed works.

John Steuart Curry returned to the University of Wisconsin where he continued to work until his death by heart attack in August of 1946 at the age of 48. In 1992, the Kansas Legislature apologized for its treatment of Curry and purchased the drawings related to his “Tragic Prelude” murals.

Second Insert Image: John Steuart Curry, Untitled, (Touchdown Hero), 1940, Charcoal and Conté Crayon on Paper on Paperboard, 52.1 x 38.7 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: John Steuart Currey, “Under the Circus Tent”, circa 1932, Watercolor on Paper, 40.6 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Henrik Arrested Uldalen

Paintings by Henrik Arrested Uldalen

The Norwegian artist Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen combines the skills of a classical figurative painter with a contemporary approach. His work depicts people in dream-like states of floating or swimming, peacefully engaged in their inner thoughts. His realistic approach captures the human form with a surreal atmosphere, reflecting the tranquility that his models are experimenting. His work does not intend to capture photographic realism but rather an emotional realism that conveys the moment of floating in nothingness.

Lyonel Feininger

Artwork by Lyonel Feininger

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States.

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012.

Top Insert Image: Andreas Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger”, 1928, Gelatin Silver Print on Board, 34.4 x 25.6 cm, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Lyonel Feininger, “Gaberndorf II”, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 100.2 x 78.1 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire: Destruction”, Oil on Canvas, 1836, New York Historical Society

The Course of Empire is a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1833–36. It is notable in part for reflecting popular American sentiments of the times, when many saw pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization, fearing that empire would lead to gluttony and inevitable decay. The theme of cycles is also one that Cole returned to frequently, such as in his The Voyage of Life series.

The series was acquired by The New-York Historical Society in 1858 as a gift of the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, and comprises the following works: The Course of Empire – The Savage State; The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State; The Course of Empire – The Consummation of Empire; The Course of Empire – Destruction; and The Course of Empire – Desolation.

The series of paintings depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city, situated on the lower end of a river valley, near its meeting with a bay of the sea. The valley is distinctly identifiable in each of the paintings, in part because of an unusual landmark: a large boulder is precariously situated atop a crag overlooking the valley. Some critics believe this is meant to contrast the immutability of the earth with the transience of man.

Alexandre Hogue

Alexandre Hogue, “Lava Capped Mesa”, 1976

Alexandre Hogue painted until the age of 96 but had only one major exhibition in his lifetime (Nature’s Forms/Nature’s Forces organized by the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa). Hogue’s work is distinct, cutting-edge, and provocative. Characterized by texture, color, and carefully balanced spatial elements, his paintings highlight the natural elements of fire, water, earth, and air. Mankind’s misuse of the natural world is a frequent theme. Hogue experimented with a variety of styles as he crafted landscapes and abstract designs, detailed sketches and whimsical representations of the earth and moon.

Jaehyo Lee

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Sculptures by Jaehyo Lee

Since graduating in 1992 with a BFA from the Hong-Ik University Jaehyo Lee (1965, Hapchen, Korea) has gained acclaim both in his native Korea and internationally for his distinct yet intimately crafted oeuvre. Combining distinct traces of Land Art, Arte Povera and Minimalism Lee´s works cast a questioning eye over the roots of form, its function and its role within the natural world.

A R Penck (Ralf Winkler)

Paintings by A R Penck (Ralf Winkler)

A R Penck is a German painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was born in Dresden, Germany, and studied together with a group of other neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. He became one of the foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz.

Under the East German communist regime, they were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In the late 1970s they were included in shows in West Berlin and were seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in a number of important shows including the famous Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.

In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist woodcut imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. The paintings are influenced by Paul Klee’s work and mix the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock.

Mentaiko Itto

Mentaiko Itto, “Priapus” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”

Mentaiko Itto’s amusing gay mangas are a major part of the Japanese manga publications. Bruno Gmünder has published his works for the first time in English, introducing him to a broader audience. There are already two manga volumes released from Mentaiko Itto: “Priapus” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Following Itto’s success, publisher Bruno Gmünder introduced a poster book in a large-scale format.

Kendra Haste

Wire Animal Sculptures by Kendra Haste

Kendra is a contemporary animal sculptor working with the medium of galvanised wire. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1998, Kendra has established a significant reputation in her field with work included in collections world-wide. She is a member of the Society of Wildlife Artsists (UK) and a signature member of the Sociey of Animal Artists (USA).

Public sculptures in the United Kingdom include an elephant at Waterloo Station, London and thirteen works at the Tower of London, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces in 2010.

“What interests me most about studying animals is identifying the spirit and character of the individual creatures. I try to create a sense of the living, breathing subject in a static 3-D form, attempting to convey the emotional essence without indulging in the sentimental or anthropomorphic.” -Kendra Haste

Robert Kirkman and E.J. Su, “Tech Jacket”

TechJacket

Tech Jacket was a six issue American comic book created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist E. J. Su, published monthly by Image Comics in November 2002 to April 2003. The book is a part of Kirkman’s overarcing Image Universe, which is anchored by Invincible, but also includes such heroes as Savage Dragon, Shadowhawk and Superpatriot.

Zack Thompson, a high school kid, finds a dying alien from a race of incredibly intelligent but physically weak beings called the Geldarians. To make up for this they have invented the Tech Jacket, a vest that every Geldarian is equipped with upon birth. Seeing the human and knowing his crashed spaceship is going to blow up and kill them both, the alien fits him with the Tech Jacket, saving his life.

But now the Tech Jacket can’t be removed and gives Zack “the most powerful weapons in the universe”. Removal is unpermitted, under executive decree 574-3. The vest gives him near-invulnerability, super-strength, flight, energy blasts, and a variety of weapons. The jacket also has an ability known as Host Maintenance which when activated removes and destroys all germs, bacteria and dirt from the user’s body

Lucea Spinelli

Lucea Spinelli, “Photosgraphe”, Light and Motion Photos

NYC-based photographer Lucea Spinelli has a special appreciation for light and motion in her series of moving images titled Phōtosgraphé. She utilizes chairs, swing sets, and park benches as backdrops and props for luminous forms that seem to bounce effortlessly through the frame. In some pieces the light mimics the pathway of ghostly human figures while in others it sparkles like fireflies or expands like a rainbow.

“Photography is the process of drawing with light, as it’s etymology implies: a compound of the greek words φωτός (phōtos) “light” and γραφή (graphé) “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”. Like a human eye, the camera receives impressions of light reflected off the world around us. When making long exposures, the film (or sensor) becomes a canvas for as long as the shutter is open, permitting light to act like paint on a brush.

In this way, by distilling the course of movement over time into one single image photography, in addition to it’s potential to mirror reality, also has an ability to suspend reality.” – Lucea Spinelli

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, “Deux Oiseaux (Two Birds)”, Colour Lithograph, 1975

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. He inspired in Max a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max to take up painting himself.

In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting that year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle, and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist.

In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work was exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.