Friday 30 December 2016

Giacomo Balla "Automobile Speed + Light + Noise" - 1913


“The obsession to penetrate, to conquer by all means the sense of the real, to identify with life in all fibers of our body, is at the base of our search and at the base of the esthetics of all times.” – Gino Severini ‘remarks on evolution’, Le Mercure de France, 1917

Giacomo Balla - Automobile Speed + Light + Noise - 1913

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) - Velocità d’automobile + luce + rumore, 1913
Distemper on canvas, 87 x 130 cm - Kunsthaus Zürich Collection

Theodoros Stamos "Ancestral Worship" - 1947


“Such work was the only valid response to the ‘neurosis which is our reality’.  As such, it was not abstraction at all, but ‘the realism of our time’.”  – Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) / The individual and the social, Introduction to the American Avant Garde
Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros Stamos (1922-97), Ancestral Worship, 1947. Collection: Estate of Theodoros Stamos

‘The American Abstract Expressionists ‘ by Nina Leen for Time/Life, 1951

american abstract expressionists
 
Pictured from left rear: Willem De Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; next row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; foreground: Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Missing from photo: Weldon Kees, Fritz Bultman and Hans Hofmann.

 
James Brooks (1906-1992) – “ISEN”, 1966 (Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches)

"The social condition of the modern world, which gives every experience its form, is the spiritual breakdown which followed the collapse of religion. This condition has led to the isolation of the artist from the rest from society. The modern artist's social history is that of a spiritual being in a property-loving world."- Robert Motherwell 'The Modern Painter's world', NY 1944.

Thursday 8 December 2016

Paul Cézanne "The Mont Sainte-Victiore" -1887


“There is a colour logic… The painter must obey it and nothing else.” - quote Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne The Mont Sainte-Victiore
Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906) Collection: The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Monday 5 December 2016

Käthe Kollwitz "Woman with Dead Child" - 1903

 
“Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in the artwork. Whatever they do, they can’t escape from the picture.”
– Picasso ‘conversation at Boisgeloup’, 1935

Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe (Schmidt) Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945), “Woman with Dead Child” - 1903 etching

Saturday 3 December 2016

Kandinsky 'first abstract watercolor' 1910


“The tendency toward abstraction is the consequence of man’s deep turmoil in confronting the world,” writes Wilhelm Worringer. “Ruined by the presumption to know, modern men finds himself as helpless as primitive man before the image of the world.”

Kandinsky First abstract
Wassily Kandinsky Untitled (First abstract watercolor painted at age 44 !) 1910; Munich / Monaco, Germany
Media: watercolor, paper - Dimensions: 196 x 188 cm / Collection: Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France

Friday 2 December 2016

Picasso 'Glass of Absinthe' - 1914


“How can you expect an onlooker to live an artwork of mine as I lived it?”
– Picasso ‘conversation at Boisgeloup’, 1935

Picasso Glass of Absinthe

picasso Boisgeloup picasso