Paintings



that Changed the World




(by Klaus Reichold & Bernhard Graf)



From Lascaux to Warhol






Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.

William Butler Yeats


 

The Poetic Nude
 

Absinthe and transfiguration

 

Wouldn't you like to rest? With these words her gestures assumed a new softness so that I trembled in the innermost fiber of my being as if to a voice never heard and indefinable. She felt me, and over her eyes descended a heavy veil and I fell on my knees and with my eager hand on her body, she stood up, her body taut and quivering like a living harp.

Gabriele d'Annunzio, Infermezzo, V 111-117 (1883)

 

Plagued by misfortunes: Modigliani's Self-Portrait of 1919, and his wife Jeanne Hebuterne, 1918

 

His name stood for scandal. Amedeo Modigliani was a wild aesthete after the manner of his time. He loved Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Gabnele D'Annunzio, smoked hashish, drank absinthe, danced naked on the tables of third-rate cafes, fought with the police and spent many an odd night locked up. He is supposed to have been intimate with many waitresses, painter's models and prostitutes. Once a model schoolboy, he was also tubercular and the English writer Beatrice Hastings left him when he decided to find his happiness and health in alcohol and drugs. She was fed up with getting up early every day to write the articles and poetry that put food on their table — while he slept until noon.

The young Italian, who had moved to Paris in 1910, forgot her soon enough. He met the love of his life at Mardi Gras: a girl fourteen years younger than himself, Jeanne Hebuterne. Friends warned him to keep away from her because she came from a family which had sired celebrated clerics. Her parents would find him a disgusting character. But Modigliani was not to be deterred. The tragic aesthete who, despite the excesses of his Paris life, still retained at thirty-three the beauty of his youth, had fallen deeply in love. He found in her the incarnation of the "lady with the swan-like neck" whom he had painted many hundreds of times. It was love at first sight for both of them and the power of love removed all obstacles. Jeanne defied her family to be Modigliani's permanent model. His fame grew, chiefly due to the series of paintings of which Nude with Necklace is one. The critic Francis Carco wrote in 1919 on the series: "Animal suppleness, waiting motionless in abandonment of self, in delicious languor, has never been more tellingly interpreted by a painter." Others praised Modigliani's poetic nudes as "hymns to a sensitive beauty".

The elegiac melancholy of these paintings reflects the tragedy and uncertainty of their creator's own life. For the first time he had enough money to live on, yet his health was collapsing. He died of meningitis on 24 January 1920. He was thirty-six and an incurable alcoholic. Jeanne Hebuterne, who was nearly nine months pregnant, committed suicide the following morning by jumping out of a window of her parents' fifth-floor flat.

 

Amedeo Modigliani
(1884-1920)
Nude with Necklace
1917


 

The Fiddler on the Roof
 

Folklore, music and persecution

 

Airy beings in flight as transient phenomena are at the heart of Marc Chagall's lyrical interpretation of Sholem Aleichem. The Jew floating over the rooftops is anywhere but on firm ground. And he proves that he is an acrobat solely by surviving nimbly in a world in which he is not at home. He is a strange creature who lives in books and dreams. In order to survive, he is always inventing new fantasies and dreams of riches and power so he doesn't perceive the wretchedness and hopelessness of his situation.

Avram Kampf, Chagall in the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, 1991

 

Poster for Fiddler on the Roof, for the world premiere in New York City, 1964

 

Marc Chagall's painting of a melancholy violinist has become world famous as "the fiddler on the roof". The musical of that name, adapted from a set of tales by the Russian Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem, premiered on 22 September 1964 at the Imperial Theater in New York City and was sold-out to theatres for years. The story is set in Anatevka, a little Jewish shtetl in the Russian Ukraine, shortly before the revolutionary turmoils of 1905. Tevye, a milkman who owns a lame nag, lives together with his wife Golde and their five daughters in a cramped peasant cottage; they live in bitter poverty and constant fear of pogroms. Yet Tevye drives a desperate but quick-witted bargain with God and turns the tables on tragedy by the sheer volubility of his wit.

As Maurice Samuel wrote: "Life pets the better of him but he comes off better in debate with it." At first Tevye has something to hold on to: "Without tradition our lives would be just as insecure as the fiddler up there on the roof." But then nothing turns out the way one expects. His daughters refuse to let their father choose their husbands and marry as they please. Heartbreaking scenes, being disowned by their father and the depths of despair are the consequences. An edict of the Tsar's puts an end to it all. Tevye and his wife Golde are rejected by their daughters. Denied the descendants they long for, they and all the other Jews of Anatevka are expelled from their homes.

Chagall was born in 1887, the son of a Jewish fishmonger in Liozno near the White Russian provincial capital of Vitebsk. His early life was remarkably like that which is enacted in the musical. At the age of thirty-three he had his first experience of scene painting and directing plays at the Moscow Yiddish Theatre.

In 1941 he emigrated — like Sholem Aleichem had twenty-five years earlier — to the United States, where he again worked in the theatre.

The musical Fiddler on the Roof goes back to a pre-Surrealist image of Chagall's. It was 1920 when he first painted this image on the wall of the auditorium of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre as a symbolic representation for music. Thus Chagall's colourful, opulent realm of motifs, nurtured in the soil of Jewish myth and Russian folklore, was transformed into theatre. And this theatrical reality recalls the centuries-old fate of a people who have always been driven from place to place. In the face of such hardship, often the only thing left to fall back on is faith together with irony, humanity and wit.

 

Marc Chagall
(1887-1985)
The Fiddler, 1913; Green Violinist, 1924


 

The Fat Frog at Her Side
 

The destiny of a woman painter

 

Diego. Beginning Diego. Builder Diego, my child Diego, my bridegroom Diego. Painter Diego, my lover Diego, my husband Diego, my friend Diego, my father

Diego, my mother Diego, my son Diego. I Diego. Universe. Diversity in unity. Why do I call him my Diego? He never was, nor will he ever be, mine. He is his own. Frida Kahlo, from a diary entry

Frida Kahlo, Frida; The Two Fridas, 1939
 

The Mexican painter Diego Rivera was working on a mural when a gifted young painter came by to show him some of her work. The twenty-one-year-old Frieda Kahlo (who later changed the spelling of her name to Frida) was of multicultural descent, with a German father and a Mexican mother. She wanted to know what Rivera thought of her work. A friend of Pablo Picasso's, Rivera had lived in Paris (1911—192т) and later returned to Mexico, becoming one the most important artists of the Social Realist movement. He told Kahlo that he found her work to be expressive, sensuous and of a style distinctly her own. Rivera later said that it was immediately obvious to him that this woman was exceptionally talented. He advised her to continue painting and visited her frequently. They fell in love. In 1929 Kahlo married Rivera, who was twenty-one years her senior. The "delicate dove and fat frog" were now a pair although their life together was tempestuous. The first strains of their marriage became apparent during a three-year stay in the United States. Rivera was fascinated by the country and its people but Kahlo soon had enough of the Americans. After their return to Mexico, Rivera engaged in several extramarital affairs. In 1935 he fell in love with Kahlo's sister Cristina, who had been his model for two murals. Deeply hurt, Kahlo left Rivera, revenging herself on him by having affairs of her own with men and women. In 1939 Kahlo and Rivera divorced. However, they were still drawn to each other and remarried a year later in San Francisco.

The way Kahlo remembered her first wedding is captured in Frieda and Diego Rivera. All her paintings similarly reflect the events of her stormy life, which was overshadowed not only by her unhappy marriage. Kahlo was dogged by ill health all her life. In 1913 polio left her with a crippled right foot which later had to be amputated. In 1925 fate struck again when she was riding a bus that collided with a tram and Kahlo sustained serious injuries to her lower abdomen and spine, forcing her to wear a corrective corset. These illnesses and misfortunes wore heavily upon her and she made her own psychological and physical pain the subject of many of her works. Stylistically she was influenced by Mexican folk art, particularly votive paintings. While she was a professor at the La Esmeralda Art School, she talked more about personal feelings than about art with her students. With her health declining rapidly, she wanted to commit suicide — "only Diego keeps me from doing it". Kahlo died a week after her forty-seventh birthday and her last diary entry reads: "I await the end joyfully. And I hope never to return."

 

Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, 1932

Frieda Kahlo
(1907—1954)
Frieda and Diego Rivera
1931


 

The Paranoid-Critical Camembert
 

Into the subconscious with Salvador Dali

 

You can be sure that my famous soft watches are nothing other than the affectionate, extravagant, lonely, paranoid-critical Camembert of time and space.

Salvador Dali, The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935

 

Salvador Dali


Gala and Salvador Dali
 

A ghost which can be used as a table, a skull copulating with a concert grand piano, fried eggs riding or a mournful mirror: the world that appears in Salvador Dali's pictures is certainly bizarre. He has been criticised for this, frequently and severely- He was regarded as neurotic, perverse and mad. One of the more harmless epithets applied to him "an erotomaniac eccentric". None of this bothered him in the least.

At twenty-five, the eccentric Catalonian fell in love with Elena Diakonova. He called her "Gala" and, no less scandalous than he, she shared the rest of his life. He found ingenious ways of wooing her: he cut his best shirt so short that his navel showed, turned his trousers inside out, died the hairs m his armpits bright blue and smeared his body with a mixture of fishpaste, goat dung and aspic. Just before Gala entered the house, he washed off the stinking mess, changed his clothes and collapsed at her feet, laughing hysterically. She found him repulsive, but by the end of that year she vowed: "My little boy! We'll never leave each other!"

Dali - a boy who never grew up. Spoilt by his permissive mother, he conducted sadistic experiments, and his school reports were so bad that, as a biographer relates, his parents were devastated. However, all these ploys safeguarded his boundless creativity, which drew on an inexhaustible imagination, from outside intervention. He became one of the great visionaries of the Surrealist movement and modern painting.

Influenced by Freudian psychology and inspired by his own subconscious, he captured the irrational world of his dreams, visions and hallucinations on canvas with meticulous objectivity. Making a fetish of detail, he wrote books about everything he was doing and created ballet sets and film scenarios teeming with his grotesque motifs. Dali was certainly a self-obsessed megalomaniac and a choleric one at that. He was both an anarchist and an admirer of monarchy, and has been accused of having fascist tendencies. He publicly proclaimed his right to be insane. Yet he is supposed to have drawn on mundane reality for at least some of his inspiration. The story has it that he painted The Persistence of Memory after having eaten Camembert.

 

Salvador Dali
(1904—1989)
The Persistence of Memory
1931


 

Man's Inhumanity to Man
 

Europe in turmoil

 

The painting which I did after the defeat of the Republicans was L'ange du foyer (Fireside angel). This is, of course, an ironic title for a clumsy figure devastating everything that gets in its way. At the time, this was my impression of what was happening in the world, and I think I was right.

Max Ernst, from his writings, 1948

 

The scene of destruction: The Basque town of Guernica у Luno after the bombing of 26 April 1937

 

Sergeant Yoldi was appalled: "There was nothing to be heard but the crackle and roar of flames. No one spoke and even the cattle trotting aimlessly through the streets made no noise. We were all dumb with horror. I had known Guernica before the war — there was nothing left of it. It had been a little town with red-roofed, white-walled houses. Now its streets were strewn with charred animal carcasses." On 26 April 1937, just twenty-four hours before Sergeant Yoldi arrived in Guernica, the town had been bombed by the German Condor Legion. This became the most famous of the Spanish Civil War atrocities, horrifying a world which had not yet grown used to air attacks on defenceless cities. The war began in July 1936, when General Francisco- Franco led a revolt against the Spanish Republic. The Spanish Left had won a parliamentary majority but was unable to restrain those among them who were deter-mined that their turn in power should be used to destroy the Right. Franco's revolt became a civil war, and Franco received the support of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, which went so far as to send troops — using the Spanish war to try out new weapons and tactics. The Republicans were supported by volunteers from all over the world, as well as by Stalin's Soviet Union. Horrifying and sadistic atrocities were committed by both sides — Pablo Picasso, who was a Spaniard, made Guernica the subject of one of his most famous paintings. After Franco's victory the German painter Max Ernst created his spectral L'ange du foyer (Fireside angel), an apocalyptic monster bursting with destructive energy, a King-Kong-like Angel of Death spreading fear and terror.

Ernst was born in 1891 at Bruhl near Cologne, and as a painter he was quite "degenerate": or this is how he was described by the propagandists of the Third Reich. In 1921 Ernst moved to Pans, where he threw himself into sculpture, print-making and film as well as painting. There he became a participant in the French Dada movement, a short-lived movement from 1916 to about 1922 which declared that all established values, morals and aesthetics had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the World War I. Later, in 1924, Ernst became a member of the Surrealist movement which followed Dada and was considered one of its most innovative members. The Surrealists still touted the importance of chance in their work, as did the Dadaists, but added to it more control and theories borrowed from psychoanalysis, emphasising the subconscious and the importance of dream imagery.

In 1937, the year he painted L'ange du foyer, Ernst learned that the National Socialists had confiscated his early work, which he had left behind m Germany. It was soon destroyed in the National Socialist effort to "purify" German art. We may suppose, then, that when he painted this work, Spain was not the only thing worrying him. When World War II began, the French interned Ernst at Aix-en-Provence as an "enemy alien", but friends interceded for him. He was released and ordered to leave France. He went to the United States of America with the help of the art connoisseur and collector Peggy Guggenheim, who he later married.

 

Max Ernst
(1891—1976)
L'ange du foyer (Fireside angel)
1937
 

Max Ernst
(1891—1976)
L'ange du foyer (Fireside angel)


 

The Silent Observer
 

An American dream

 

Dusk gently smoothes crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and water-tanks and ventilators and fire-escapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky.

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925

 

In Edward Hopper's urban pictures there are no skyscrapers. Nor are there any massive highway systems, sprawling strip-malls, factories or slums. African-Americans, Hispanics or Asians are also absent from his city scenes. Hopper, a native New Yorker, studied commercial art, attended art school and made several tours of Europe before starting out as a commercial artist with an advertising firm. He only painted, middle-class white America, with occasional references to its mechanical civilisation: a deserted filling station or an abandoned typewriter. Still he is regarded as the greatest Realist painter of his generation. Hopper's paintings record everyday American life, circa 1920—1960, but he particularly emphasised its dreariness. He refused to sing paeans of praise to the "land of unlimited possibilities". He thought America "hideously chaotic" and directed his attention to the everyday philistines, those who did not start off washing dishes or would not end up millionaires on Long Island. Portraying the mundane and seemingly joyless activities of their daily lives, he eschewed overt technical brilliance and painterly precision. There is always a tragic, paralyzing monotony, a creeping anxiety, whether he is hinting at endless unpopulated expanses behind the trees along a deserted road or the grim dinginess of Manhattan tenements viewed in the glare from an elevated railway. Hopper often sketched his figures against the backdrop of New York City, where 3.5 million anonymous lives were already swallowed up by the early twentieth century.

Few paintings are more haunting than Nigkthawks. Hopper himself said that the work showed a restaurant at an intersection of Greenwich Avenue. He had simplified the melancholy scene and enlarged the restaurant. He reflected that he had more or less instinctively tried to paint the loneliness of a big city. The starkness of Hopper's approach may well have been inspired by Ernest Hemingway. Hopper found Hemingway's short story, The Killers, written in the 1920s, to be refreshingly different from what one usually encountered when leafing through an American magazine. The authenticity of Hemingway's work contrasted sharply with the pretentious, sugary pap churned out by his contemporaries. Hopper thought Hemingway refused to make concessions to popular taste, never deviating from the truth and offering no delusive hopes at the end. Like Hemingway, Hopper never sugar-coated anything.

 

Edward Hopper
(1882-1967)
Nigkthawks
1942


 

Claustrophobic Fear
 

Francis Bacon and the pope

 

I have always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth. People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications .... I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted the sunset.

David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon: 1962-1979. 1975

 

Francis Bacon

Shot in the eye: A still from Sergey Eisenstein's film The battleship Potemkin, 1925

The pope setting an example: Diego Diego Velazquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650
 

Pope Innocent X was a magnanimous prince of the Church and a discerning lover of the arts but was said to have less influence over the Vatican Curia than his brother's widow, whose intercession was sought out by cardinals and ambassadors. Yet Innocent X was thought to be a good Pope — especially in Spain. He had taken the Spanish side in some royal quarrels and his portrait was painted in 1650 by the court painter of King Philip IV, Diego Velazquez (1599—1660). Nearly 300 years later, Velazquez's portrait became the fascination of a very modern artist. In 1909 Francis Bacon was born to English parents living in Dublin, but his fascination for this portrait did not develop until 1949: "I think it is one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made, and I became obsessed by it. I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velazquez Pope (Innocent X), because it haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings Bacon executed over twenty-five variations on Velazquez's work, among them Head VI. Bacon said that he had intended to work over the picture plane to make it look like "the skin of a hippopotamus", though in other respects the picture was painted to be "like Velazquez". Yet Bacon had never seen Velazquez's original portrait, which hangs in the Galleria Doria Pamphih in Rome. Bacon claimed that for nearly two or three years he was so entranced by this portrait, that he attempted to paint a work equal to it. Bacon speculated that it was partly due to the magnificent handling of colour which intrigued him. Or the high office of Innocent X, who surveyed the world from a sovereign's throne. Pope Innocent X had the appearance of a tragic hero. This is what Bacon wanted to portray, but, unlike Velazquez, he tore off the official facade to reveal the inner man. Bacon's Pope Innocent X does not look at us ex cathedra.
He is a private person, a solitary being whose sufferings, brought on by loneliness, are wrenched from him in a scream - as if his isolation had induced claustrophobic fear.

Head VI may remind us of Albert Camus's The Stranger, Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit or perhaps even Sergey Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein's film of the 1925 Russian revolution contains a brutal close-up: a screaming woman is being hit in the eye by a bullet, losing control of the pram she has been pushing. The scene is a distillation of existential fear; a still photo of it was hanging in Bacon's studio when he painted Head VI.

 

Francis Bacon
(1909—1992)
Head VI
1949
Arts Council Collection and Hayward Gallery, London
 

Francis Bacon
Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X


 

Making Myths
 

Film and art

 

So we think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.

Norman Mailer, Marilyn, 1973

 

Marilyn Monroe

____


see collection: Marilyn Monroe


 

She acted out her life under the devouring gaze of a gigantic audience, one that couldn't get enough of her: Marilyn, the enchanting child-woman, the breathtaking sex-symbol, the unattainable goddess of film. She was unforgettable in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like It Hot, and The Seven-Year Itch. She was wildly acclaimed, dominated the headlines, filled the gossip columns and incarnated the dreams of a decade. Behind the glitz, glamour and the luscious smile which enthralled the world was a vulnerable and immature woman. Did America know it all along? Was that the secret source of her mystique; She had a terrible childhood. She said that she was probably a mistake, that her mother hadn't wanted to have her at all. She never knew her father and was bounced between her mother's home and a series of adoptive families; her mother had a nervous breakdown and Marilyn spent two years in an orphanage. She never graduated from high school and married at sixteen, perhaps to avoid being sent back to an orphanage. She was later to comment that her marriage wasn't unhappy; but it wasn't happy either. She and her husband just didn't have much to say to each other.

Her discovery was all part of the war effort. While her husband was fighting in World War II Marilyn was in a factory checking parachutes. Ronald Reagan sent David Conover, a twenty-five-year-old army photographer, to photograph cheerful young munitions-factory workers. Conover took notice of this girl who could make more out of a pose than anyone he had ever seen. The publicists took his discovery and created "Marilyn Monroe", the icon of post-war Hollywood. She was oddly detached and alienated, saying she always had the feeling that she was not real, that she was something like a well-made counterfeit. She was sure that everyone had similar feelings from time to time but in her case things had gone so far that she sometimes thought she was completely synthetic. She died on the night of 4 August 1962 under mysterious circumstances, but her legend lived on and even grew.

Andy Warhol, the son of Czech immigrants, began his artistic career in advertising, moved on to film-making and became high-society's favourite portrait artist. He ended up a cult figure, probably the cult figure, of Pop Art. His Marilyn Monroe is a twentieth-century icon of art. He wrote of his work that, whether or not his loud colours made her into a symbol was irrelevant, and if the colours were beautiful, it was because she was; beauty calls for beautiful colours. Marilyn Monroe was commercialised beauty, quite artificial and quite misunderstood.

 

Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)
Turquoise Marilyn
1962
 

Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)
Turquoise Marilyn
 

Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)
Pink Marilyn Reversal
1986
 

Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)
Marilyn Monroe
1967
 

Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)
Marilyn Monroe