One of Bastien-Lepage's finest works, particularly popular among Russian artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. ‘The Village Lovers’ was much admired by Valentin Serov, Mikhail Nesterov and Lev Tolstoy. The ability to combine a realistic subject with a lyrical landscape, to record moments of harmony between man and nature with such remarkable precision, brought Bastien-Lepage widespread fame as a 'poetic realist'.

One early reading, by Mette, the wife of Paul Gauguin, held that the girl was under age, and the relationship accordingly beyond the pale. The girl not only faces away from the viewer, but her whole body is turned away, leaving that issue unresolved and unresolvable.

The Village Lovers, 1882 by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

 One of Bastien-Lepage's finest works, particularly popular

“Bearden recreates a scene based on a story from the Hebrew Bible in which King Solomon ruled between two women who each claimed to be the mother of a child.”⁣

 Romare Bearden⁣ King Solomon's Judgement⁣ 1978⁣ “Bearden

“Considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, Romare Bearden’s artwork depicted African American culture and experience in creative and thought-provoking ways. Born in North Carolina in 1911, Bearden spent much of his career in New York City. His early works were realistic images, often with religious themes, later transitioning to abstract and Cubist style paintings in oil and watercolor. He is best known for his photomontage compositions made from torn images of popular magazines and assembled into visually powerful statements on African American life.⁣

Born September 2, 1911, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden was the only child of Richard and Bessye Bearden. The family moved to New York City when he was a toddler, where their household was a gathering place for Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington.⁣

The works of Bearden’s cover a wide range of techniques, themes, and styles. In college, Bearden aspired to be a cartoonist, drawing for and then editing Boston College’s humor magazine in the early 1930s. He continued his cartooning after he moved to New York City to attend New York University. After college, he joined an artist group and became excited about modern art, particularly Cubism, Futurism, post-Impressionism and Surrealism. He traveled to France to study at the Sorbonne.⁣

Though Bearden was vastly prolific, he is not that widely recognized as a major American artist. The American art world possessed the same prejudices and segregation of society. Also, Bearden’s work is hard to categorize. But during this life and after, his exhibitions have received enthusiastic reviews and critical praise and he was recognized with multiple awards and honorary doctorates.”⁣

🏛 (The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection)⁣

 Romare Bearden⁣ Falling Star⁣ 1979⁣ “Considered one of the

“Bear Lake is located in an area north of Taos on Taos Pueblo land. It is a sacred site to the Taos Indians, not accessible to the public. This painting was apparently exhibited only once, at An American Place, the gallery Alfred Stieglitz opened in 1929, and the painting remained in her possession. That O’Keeffe considered it a significant work is indicated by the star that she penciled on the backing board.1⁣

The mountain at Bear Lake that dominates the painting is composed parallel to the picture plane and cropped at the sides, decisions that decrease the appearance of deep space while increasing the static dominance of the mountain. The timeless feeling thus achieved is reinforced by O’Keeffe’s decision to lessen the three-dimensionality of the mountain by eliminating smaller geological details and limiting modeling to a few carefully chosen features, such as the irregular folds of mountain walls in the right half of the painting. The startling colors of New Mexico deeply impressed O’Keeffe. Here the rich purple mountainside, accented with gray patches, is seen in shifting half lights.”⁣

 Georgia O’Keeffe⁣ Mountain at Bear Lake - Taos⁣ 1930⁣ “Bear

“With his abstractions composed of paint transformed into light, Robert Delaunay made a crucial contribution to art in the early 20th century. His new aesthetics arose out of a quest for ‘pure painting’, which he discovered in the synthesis of Impressionist series and Cubist tradition. Delaunay used 19th-century colour theories to experiment with the reflection and refraction of light, a process for which art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term ‘Orphism’. Derived from the name of the mythical bard Orpheus, Orphism is a painting style based on rhythmic chromatic harmony.⁣

Delaunay’s work represents the fullest flowering of Orphism, particularly in his Circular Forms, Sun and Moon. The painting is dated 1912 to 1931 in the bottom left corner; the unusually large time span for the work’s creation is enough to signal how important the composition must have been for the artist. The subtitle ‘Sun and Moon’ bespeaks less a figuratively legible form than the atmospheric differences between the two qualities of light. Loosely assembled, floating circles are concentrated in two focal points: to the right the brilliantly glowing solar area with an assortment of mutually permeated circle fragments, and to the left the nocturnal side, comprised of many thickly applied, concentric circles. The pale moonlight is echoed in the cool blue, turquoise and red, while the prismatic fan of the sunlight is represented in warm, contrasting facets.⁣

Delaunay was inspired by more than the electric light of the Parisian metropolis. In his paintings he strove towards a space that was now becoming accessible thanks to new vehicles like the Zeppelin and the airplane, while in his rainbow-bright discs composed of simultaneously perceptible contrasts he was the first French artist to devise an abstract visual vocabulary.”⁣

 Robert Delaunay⁣ Circular forms. Sun and Moon⁣ 1912/1931⁣

Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue⁣

“Piet Mondrian’s 1921 painting, Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, best represents the painter’s distinct style in which he reduced his shapes to lines and rectangles and his palette to fundamental basics pushing past references to the outside world toward pure abstraction. Mondrian’s painting conveys the influences of various modern art movements such as Luminism, Impressionism, and most importantly, Cubism. By using basic forms such as rectangles and straight lines and colors such as white, red and yellow, Mondrian believed that his vision of modern art would overcome differences in culture and become a new common language based in the pure primary colors, flatness of forms, and dynamic tension of his painting.⁣

In this painting, Mondrian limited his palette to white, black, gray, and the three primary colors, with the composition constructed from thick, black horizontal and vertical lines that delineated the outlines of the various rectangles of color or reserve. Such simple pictorial elements are representative of Mondrian’s creation of new abstract art, even distinct from Cubism. His use of blocks of color and lines echoes the varied rhythms of modern life. And although the colors and the thickness of lines are very distinct from each other, they complement each other by balancing out the differences.”⁣

 Piet Mondrian⁣ Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow

“This piece was illustrated by Haddon Sundblom for Ladies Home Journal in 1947. ⁣

Sundblom was born in Muskegon, Michigan, to a Swedish-speaking family. His father, Karl Wilhelm Sundblom, came from the farm Norrgårds in the village of Sonnboda in Föglö, Åland Islands, then part of the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland now Finland, and his mother Karin Andersson was from Sweden. Sundblom studied at the American Academy of Art.”⁣

 Haddon Sundblom⁣ The Unpossessed⁣ 1947⁣ “This piece was

“Sakai’s undulating compositions are instantly recognizable as part of his signature aesthetic. What makes his paintings distinct from those of other artists engaging with geometric abstraction is how the fluidity and synthesis of colors that form curvatures and undulations juxtapose the rigidity of the clearly defined bands of color. His work was thereby defined by a dialogue between organic form and precise structure. For Sakai, color harmonies produced a sense of purity by reducing the compositions on the canvas to the rhythms produced from the interactions between different hues.”⁣

🏛 (Inter-American Development Bank)⁣

 Kazuya Sakai⁣ Chromatology II⁣ 1975⁣ “Sakai’s undulating

“One of the most interesting fields within Vytautas Kasiulis’ work are genre pieces depicting interior scenes that have almost no externally evident activity. This means the painter can concentrate on new aesthetic studies and the search for unexpected colour resolutions on the canvas. The artist thinking is one of the most decorative compositions of Vytautas Kasiulis that was created in the 1950s in Paris. The familiar and frequently variated motif takes on a new resonance as the artist has chosen two contrasting blurs of colour that appear to divide the total composition in half. The poster-like openess of the red and faded green expanses, painted in small, vertical strokes, take on the resonance of stained glass.”⁣

🏛 (Lithuanian National Museum of Art)⁣

 Vytautas Kasiulis⁣ The Artist Thinking ⁣ 1950s⁣ “One of the

“After her sudden death from an overdose of sleeping pills in August 1962, superstar Marilyn Monroe's life, career, and tragedy became a worldwide obsession. Warhol, being infatuated with fame and pop culture, obtained a black-and-white publicity photo of her (from her 1953 film Niagara) and used the photo to create several series of images. A common idea to all the Marilyn works was that her image was reproduced over and over again as one would find it reprinted in newspapers and magazines at the time. After viewing dozens, or hundreds of such images, a viewer stops seeing a person depicted, but is left with an icon of popular, consumer culture. The image (and the person) become another cereal box on the supermarket shelf, one of hundreds of boxes - which are all exactly the same. ⁣

In Gold Marilyn Monroe, Warhol further plays on the idea iconography, placing Marilyn's face on a very large golden-colored background. The background is reminiscent of Byzantine religious icons that are the central focus in Orthodox faiths to this day. Only instead of a god, we are looking at an image (that becomes a bit garish upon closer inspection) of a woman that rose to fame and died in horrible tragedy. Warhol subtly comments on our society, and its glorification of celebrities to the level of the divine. Here again the Pop artist uses common objects and images to make very pointed insights into the values and surroundings of his contemporaries.”⁣

 Andy Warhol⁣ Gold Marilyn Monroe⁣ 1962⁣ “After her sudden

“"I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about." Warhol's statement epitomizes his ethos; his works put ordinary items front and center. This idea applies to the hand-painted portrait of a Coca-Cola bottle. Another challenge to the domination of Abstract Expressionism, Warhol's Coca-Cola is equal in size to many of the popular canvases of the time (6ft x 5ft) but is devoid of their abstractions. However, there are some other similarities here. As in Barnett Newman's popular Stations of the Cross series of works, Coca-Cola is comprised of a large, black mass on a white background. The bottle jumps out at the viewer; demanding the kind of attention Motherwell's profound canvases received - yet now the sense of irony reigns.”⁣

 Andy Warhol⁣ Coca-Cola ⁣ 1962⁣ “"I just paint things I

“It is one of the most beautiful self-portraits that Frida ever created. It is a passionate expression of her deep love for nature and unending desire to sire children. The portrait shows Khalo nourishing the land by siring a vine, though it does not have any roots as it is rooted in her womb.⁣

Also, the stems of this vine do not have thorns. Rather, they have thirteen leafless stems to depict Kahlo’s losses. Kahlo had lost her father, experienced miscarriages and gone through many operations to repair different areas of her body after the severe accident she went through when she was 19 years. It explains why the vine grows from her womb-less body and moves toward the viewer as if we are the source of hope or light. Frida fixes an impassive gaze on the viewer in a bid to beckon the viewer to confront her predicament.⁣

Most of Frida's self-portraits are an expression of pain, emotional frustration and disappointment. In this painting, she uses an imaginative overtone of symbolism and visionary art to depict her losses, death of loved ones and her inability to sire children. Kahlo criticises her unfortunate state and portrays her sense of guilt in a rather bold way. During this time, Frida had taken to the Surrealist style, though she borrows a few ideas from the traditional Mexican art forms when creating this painting.”⁣

 Frida Kahlo⁣ Roots⁣ 1943⁣ “It is one of the most beautiful

“Botero is best known for painting exaggeratedly voluptuous figures and portraits that can be read as either comical or critical. Working in Paris since the late 1950s but regularly visiting his hometown of Medellín, Colombia, Botero is one of the most widely known artists from Latin America. His portrait La familia presidencial (The Presidential Family) combines all the trademarks of his best works and serves as a critique of civil society and state authority. It depicts the president of Colombia—the male figure in the back of the group to the left—his family, and those with whom he shares state power. The president, his wife, his daughter, and a grandmother can be seen on the left, while a general and a bishop appear on the right. Botero's depiction might be understood as a veiled critique but leaves his ultimate motives ambiguous.”⁣

 Fernando Botero⁣ The Presidential Family⁣ 1967⁣ “Botero is

“Joseph Pickett never ventured far from New Hope, Pennsylvania, a town on the banks of the Delaware River. Working for the local carnival, he traveled through his native Bucks County, yet for most of his life he was a fixture in New Hope, working there as a craftsman and storekeeper. When he came to painting in his later years, his ambition was to depict the history and landscape of the region he knew so well. Curator Holger Cahill encountered Pickett’s work in New Hope, and it was included in such MoMA exhibitions as American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900 (1932) and Masters of Popular Painting (1938). Pickett’s aesthetic was a natural fit for the Whitney’s founding collection in 1931, since the museum’s first director, Juliana Force, also had roots in Bucks County and a special interest in folk art.⁣

Without formal training, Pickett improvised his materials and technique. He achieved textural effects approximating the objects he depicted by mixing house paint with sand, shell, and other gritty substances. Working slowly, he would spend years on each canvas (only four finished compositions are extant) and build up his surfaces in thick applications of paint. Despite the sculptural outer layer, which sometimes measured nearly a half-inch thick, the world represented by Pickett appears flat for its lack of shading. In works like MoMA’s Manchester Valley (1914–1918?), Pickett recognized the importance of the area as a transportation hub between Philadelphia and New York City, using a steam locomotive to divide two wooded landscapes with different spatial systems.⁣”

 Joseph Pickett⁣ Manchester Valley⁣ 1914-18?⁣ “Joseph

“Van Gogh is remarkable for how meticulously his life was recorded. “We know an amazing amount about him,” Bomford said. “He was writing letters almost every day, so we know what he was thinking almost every day of his life. We can trace his thought process, his passions, his agonies, his difficulties from day to day, which is astonishing. We can do that for hardly any other artist who has ever existed.”⁣

Van Gogh’s writing dovetailed with his work, as the catalogue for the exhibition extensively notes. Of the color yellow, a recurring and almost spiritual presence in his work, the artist wrote: “Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow—pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is!””⁣

 Vincent Van Gogh Wheatfield with a Reaper⁣⁣ 1889⁣ “Van Gogh

The World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar (Men Greeting Entry into Lagos)⁣

“Growing up in Los Angeles, California to humble roots, artist Kehinde Wiley witnessed the devastating devaluing of the African-American male in culture and society. Personally having experienced abandonment at a young age by his Nigerian father, Wiley began to notice a crisis of identity and a lack of heroes amongst those in the African-American male community. At the age of twenty, the artist traveled to Africa to meet his father and discover his own heritage, a move that helped to shape his future style.⁣

Influenced by a talent that developed early in life, Wiley went on to study art at Yale University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He now lives in New York. By routinely referencing art history through his work and utilizing a (almost neoclassical) photorealist style of portraiture, Wiley evokes a sense of historical heroism and regality in his subjects who are typically black men. Through his portrayal of urban African-American men in historically powerful poses, Wiley brings to the foreground issues of identity, individual worth, culture, class, and racism.⁣

A beautiful example of the artist’s innovative style can be found in Three Wise Men Greeting Entry into Lagos (Oil on Canvas, 2008). Referencing the Lagos Three Elders statue, Wiley heroically portrays three young men (in traditional African cloth) in a pose of greeting.  The three young men look down on viewers with self-assuredness and confidence. Wiley’s skills, as well as his content are clear.”⁣

 Kehinde Wiley ⁣ The World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar (Men

“An influential artist based in Chicago, Gertrude Abercrombie was largely self taught. She established her mature style, a haunting synthesis of American folk-art, surrealism, and sixteenth-century Flemish painting, by 1940. This enigmatic little painting includes many aspects of Abercrombie’s best narrative work of the 1940s and 1950s. Abercrombie has included herself in a spooky nocturnal landscape that was likely composed from a synthesis of memory and the imagination. She loved to invent mysterious and magical settings in which a few symbolically-charged objects or details interact in a provocative way. In a statement written for a 1945 exhibition catalogue, Abercrombie described this process. “I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace,” she wrote. “I like and like to paint simple things that are a little strange. My work comes directly from my inner consciousness and it must come easily. It is a process of selection and reduction.”⁣

Many of her compositions feature a lone woman, often depicted with attributes of sorcery (an owl, or a broomstick). She painted many variations of her favored subjects (sparsely furnished interiors, self-portraits and still-lifes). She considered herself ugly, and sometimes she wore a pointed velvet hat to accentuate her witch-like appearance. You can see her works at the Illinois State Museum, Springfield.”⁣

 Gertrude Abercrombie ⁣ Girl Searching⁣ 1945⁣ “An

“In his Chadds Ford studio, Wyeth decided to paint Island Funeral in egg tempera on a gesso panel. Part of the process involved texturing the surface of the gesso, which Wyeth did with a sharp point, such as a stylus or the end of a brush. In some areas, the gouged lines enhance the painted image; in other areas, the gouged lines are more randomly applied. The overall surface texture energizes the image and adds visual interest.⁣

One of the most striking features of the painting is the intensity of the blues and greens Wyeth used. These colors were the result of an informal collaboration between the artist and the DuPont Company. Chemists employed at the company's Jackson Laboratory provided Wyeth with pigments made from "Monastral Fast Blue B" and "Monastral Fast Green G," two vibrant, light fast dyes that had been recently developed at DuPont.”⁣

 N. C. Wyeth⁣ Island Funeral⁣ 1939⁣ “In his Chadds Ford

“Kusama’s regular use of polka dots has made her name synonymous with this motif. They begin to appear in her earliest compositions, including Accumulation, an ink-on-paperboard field of black polka dots in empty space. This drawing is among the thousands of paintings and drawings on paper she began producing in 1951 in Japan. Though the scale of these compositions is intimate, for the artist they evoke a sense of vastness. She once described them as reflecting “the great depth of my inner heart.” Like much of her work to come, Accumulation is based on repetition—or as its title suggests, on the accumulation of her repeating marks—and stems largely from the aural and visual hallucinations Kusama had been experiencing since she was 10 years old. “I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings,” she once explained.”⁣

 Yayoi Kusama⁣ Accumulation⁣ 1952⁣ “Kusama’s regular use of

“In the summer of 1966, while still working on his Brushstrokes, Lichtenstein designed a poster for New York City's Lincoln Center, taking as his subject the architecture and design of the 1920s–30s. This initiated a series that parodied the style of Art Deco, which Lichtenstein ironically described as "Cubism for the Home." Like the Landscapes paintings that preceded them, the artist's Modern works are among the relatively rare pieces in his oeuvre without an anchoring reference to a specific artist or object. They are inventions based on one of his favored notions: impure style. Here he humorously stylized an already-stylized style.⁣

While attempting to summon the style of the period, Lichtenstein's foremost aims were, as always, form and composition. The Modern series strikes an extraordinary balance between verticals and diagonals, curves and straight edges, dynamic and static forms. In Modern Painting with Bolt (1967), the lightning strike both divides and unifies, becoming an Art Deco equivalent of a comic-book explosion. Works like Modern Painting Triptych (1967) explore a modular format of panels in various arrangements with the same image repeated sequentially on all panels, begging the semantic issue of whether the works represent one painting or multiple paintings.”⁣

 Roy Lichtenstein⁣ Modern Painting with Bolt⁣ 1967⁣ “In the

“Sebastià Junyent i Sans was born in Barcelona in 1865. He was the son of an manufacturer from the carrer del Rec that each year organised the carnival of the Born with the cultural society Societat del Born.⁣

Sebastià Junyent was one of the representatives of the first generation of modernist painters and led the Association of Catalan Painters and Sculptors of 1904, that grouped together the names of major post modernist artists —Mir, Nonell, Picasso, Junyer i Vidal, Gargallo, Fontbona, Nogués, Pidelaserra, Ysern, and the Oslé brothers, amongst others.⁣

Junyent was friend and protector of the young Picasso, showing special esteem for him during his stay in Barcelona, but his relationship also continued when Picasso had settled in Paris.  In 1903 Junyent helped him with the debts of his studio in Barcelona and subsequently he lent him a studio that he had in carrer Bonavista. He was also responsible for the fact that the magazine Joventut (with which he collaborated) published some of Picasso’s drawings during 1904 and 1905.⁣

Currently, the Portrait of Sebastià Junyent is conserved in the Museu Picasso.”⁣

 Pablo Picasso⁣ Portrait of Sebastià Junyent Sans⁣ 1904⁣

The Tilled Field (La terre labourée)⁣⁣

“During the summer of 1923 Joan Miró began painting The Tilled Field, a view of his family’s farm in Montroig, Catalonia. Although thematically related to his earlier quasi-realistic, Fauvist-colored rural views, such as Prades, The Village, this painting is the first example of Miró’s Surrealist vision. Its fanciful juxtaposition of human, animal, and vegetal forms and its array of schematized creatures constitute a realm visible only to the mind’s eye, and reveal the great range of Miró’s imagination. While working on the painting he wrote, “I have managed to escape into the absolute of nature.” The Tilled Field is thus a poetic metaphor that expresses Miró’s idyllic conception of his homeland, where, he said, he could not “conceive of the wrongdoings of mankind.”⁣⁣

The complex iconography of The Tilled Field has myriad sources, and attests to Miró’s long-standing interest in his artistic heritage. The muted, contrasting tones of the painting recall the colors of Catalan Romanesque frescoes, while the overt flatness of the painting—space is suggested by three horizontal bands indicating sky, sea, and earth—and the decorative scattering of multicolored animals throughout were most likely inspired by medieval Spanish tapestries. These lively creatures are themselves derived from Catalan ceramics, which Miró collected and kept in his studio. The stylized figure with a plow has its source in the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira, which Miró knew well. Even the enormous eye peering through the foliage of the pine tree, and the eye-covered pine cone beneath it, can be traced to examples of early Christian art, in which the wings of angels were bedecked with many tiny eyes. Miró found something alive and magical in all things: the gigantic ear affixed to the trunk of the tree, for example, reflects his belief that every object contains a living soul.”⁣⁣

 Joan Miró⁣⁣ The Tilled Field (La terre labourée)⁣⁣ 1924⁣⁣

“Prometheus, painted in 1919 and published the following year, visually translates a mythical tale of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the Olympian gods and presented it to early man, thus allowing for the evolution of civilization and cultural progress. As a result of this act, Prometheus became the patron of all earthly artists and thinkers as he brought enlightenment to the world. Parrish emphasizes this heroic interpretation in the present work by depicting the subject in clear mythological glory. Bathed in a warm golden light, Prometheus is rendered in the classical Greek style, idealized and youthful, returning triumphantly to earth bearing the flame of the gods.⁣⁣

The preternatural landscape rendered behind the figure was likely conjured by Parrish’s fertile imagination; he created these make-believe “Parrishscapes” by synthesizing both real and imagined natural elements. Behind the protagonist, a distant view reveals a mysterious mountainous landscape. The artist’s dazzling gifts as a colorist reveal themselves as the dramatic moonlight beams down upon the crystal calm lake and the craggy outcroppings that surround it. The velvety, midnight blue was reportedly inspired by the effects of light filtering through the cloud layer that Parrish felt was specific to New England: “There is an intense blue in New England,” he once wrote. “Put a mountain here, against the east, in a clear sunset glow, and it would be more startling than in Arizona” (quoted in Alma Gilbert, The Masterworks, Berkeley, California, 1992, p. 103). The present work exhibits a remarkable luminosity and purity of colors that Parrish attained by painting with layers of transparent colored glazes, now considered a hallmark of his distinctive style. Displaying lush color effects and an extraordinary attention to detail, Prometheus impressively demonstrates the unique style and vivid imagination that has earned Parrish his place among the most celebrated and beloved of American illustrators.”⁣⁣

 Maxfield Parrish⁣⁣ Prometheus⁣⁣ 1919⁣⁣ “Prometheus, painted

“Miró painted this towering canvas in summer or fall of 1925 at his family’s farm in Montroig, a small village nestled between the mountains and coast of his native Catalonia. He was buoyed by the success of his recent exhibition in Paris, where he had been feted by many of the young poets and painters associated with the Surrealist movement. Their signatures emblazoned his exhibition’s invitation, claiming Miró as one of their own. The question after he returned to Spain was what he would do next. The Birth of the World is one of his answers.⁣

With this work, Miró went, to quote a favorite Surrealist dictum, “beyond painting,” with “painting” understood to be his own past work and Western artistic tradition. He jettisoned the rules of perspective that painters had used since the Renaissance to construct illusionistic pictorial space, and instead he covered the ground of his vast canvas with an astonishing variety of abstract painterly incidents: spatters, smears, stains, drips, cascades, bursts, smudges, explosions, spurts, and diaphanous washes vie for attention with a series of minimal motifs that are as much drawn as painted. The result was a new and radically unconstrained form of painting that Miró would later describe as “a sort of genesis,” and that his Surrealist poet friends titled The Birth of the World.”⁣

 Joan Miró⁣ The Birth of the World⁣ Montroig, late

“Indigenous vendors with oversized bundles of lilies are part of a recurring theme in Diego Rivera's work. His first such painting, Dia de Flores dates to 1925. He continued his flower vendor series through the 1940s. One of his best-known renditions is Vendedora de Flores, or The Flower Vendor, from 1942. Rivera's works appear simple at first glance, but The Flower Vendor is rife with symbolism.⁣

One of the striking similarities among Rivera's flower seller paintings is the anonymity of the human figures. In the 1942 work, the figure is facing forward, yet she bows her head and closes her eyes. It looks like she is steeling herself to shoulder a heavy burden. The huge bundle of oversized lilies dwarfs her human figure.⁣

The light-hued lilies contrast with the darker tones in the scenes of flower vendors. Rivera paints his lilies white, greenish-white or bright yellow. Both the size and brightness of the flowers overpower the human figures. In one sense, the domination of the flowers represents the domination of the upper classes over the poorest classes. The vendors bow down to and serve those with the money to buy such luxury items.⁣

In another sense, the lilies symbolize death. They are a common funeral flower. As such, Rivera may be juxtaposing the blossoming of the present with the dying traditions of the past.⁣

Unlike most of his other works in the series, Rivera's Vendedora de Flores of 1942 shows two figures rather than one. In the foreground, the vendor prepares to shoulder the large basket of lilies. In the background, a partially concealed figure grasps the basket, ready to help her lift it up.”⁣

 Diego Rivera ⁣ Flower Vendor (Vendedora de Flores)⁣ 1942⁣

“Sharecropper reveals Elizabeth Catlett’s lifelong concern for the oppressed and the dignity of women. The print focuses on a female farm worker whose face, made rough and leathery by years of toil, is nonetheless determined and commanding.⁣

After the Civil War, many former slaves became sharecroppers, or farmers who worked on rented land and received an agreed share of the crop as payment. This economic system trapped many of these African Americans, as well as white workers, in a cycle of poverty. Set in the 1950s, Catlett’s Sharecropper refers to the injustices that this unfair system exerted on the poor. ⁣

Emphasizing the triumph of the worker over her harsh conditions, Catlett represented this poor, anonymous figure with the strength, dignity, and heroism generally reserved for individuals of power.”⁣

 Elizabeth Catlett ⁣ Sharecropper ⁣ 1952⁣ “Sharecropper

“As an artist, Julian Martínez from San Ildefonso Pueblo is best known for the ceramics he made with his wife, Maria Martínez. Together, they produced the matte-black on polished-black pottery for which they and their Pueblo colleagues gained international fame.⁣

Maria formed the pots into elegant shapes and Julian painted the designs, both geometric and figurative, including historic motifs such as the feather pattern from Mimbres pottery and the avanyu, the horned serpent similar the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl.”⁣

 Maria and Julian Martínez⁣ pot with avanyu design⁣ 1934-43⁣

“In 1913 Klimt broke with his annual three-month visit to Attersee spa in the Austrian Alps, and went to the Italian Lake Garda instead, possibly under the increasing influence of Egon Schiele, who preferred to travel abroad. Whether as a result of the change of light or scenery, this work amply demonstrates its superb effect on him. As in Austria, Klimt paints the scene from a boat out on the water, yet the dramatic distinction of this landscape is the transformed handling of subject-matter, panorama, lighting, and form. It is a wonderful light, expansive work unlike the usual claustrophobic style of his typically intense Austrian scenes. The atmosphere is of life and frivolity rather than the somber, emotionally charged visions of home. ⁣

Some critics point to Cubism as the agent of change. Klimt came into contact with the movement during recent trips to Paris where works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were on display. Schiele's own landscapes during this period certainly explore a more Cubist approach and both artists probably discussed the dynamic implications of this new formal esthetic. But in Klimt's case, comparison with Cubism is stretching a point. Here its influence was only experimental and conducted in a casual, limited fashion. Sadly, this singular work was also destroyed in the Schloss Immendorf fire.”⁣

 Gustav Klimt⁣ Malcesine on Lake Garda⁣ 1913⁣ “In 1913 Klimt

“Born in New York in 1916, Eyvind Earle began his prolific career at the age of ten when his father, Ferdinand Earle, gave him a challenging choice: read 50 pages of a book or paint a picture every day. Earle choose both. From the time of his first one-man showing in France when he was 14, Earle’s fame had grown steadily. At the age of 21, Earle bicycled across country from Hollywood to New York, paying his way by painting 42 watercolors. In 1937, he opened at the Charles Morgan Galleries, his first of many one-man shows in New York. Two years later at his third consecutive showing at the gallery, the response to his work was so positive that the exhibition sold out and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of his paintings for their permanent collection. His earliest work was strictly realistic, but after having studied the work of a variety of masters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rockwell, Kent and Georgia O’Keefe, Earle by the age of 21, came into his own unique style. His oeuvre is characterized by a simplicity, directness and surety of handling.⁣

In 1951 Earle joined Walt Disney studios as an assistant background painter. Earle intrigued Disney in 1953 when he created the look of “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” an animated short that won an Academy Award and a Cannes Film Festival Award. Disney kept the artist busy for the rest of decade, painting the settings for such stories as “Peter Pan”, “For Whom the Bulls Toil”, “Working for Peanuts”, “Pigs is Pigs”, “Paul Bunyan” and “Lady and the Tramp”. Earle was responsible for the styling, background and colors for the highly acclaimed movie “Sleeping Beauty” and gave the movie its magical, medieval look. He also painted the dioramas for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.”⁣

 Eyvind Earle⁣ Green Hillside⁣ 1970⁣ “Born in New York in

“Beginning in 1962 Lichtenstein borrowed images of explosions from popular war comics for use in his paintings. The subject embodies the revolutionary nature of Pop art and suggests the very real threat of annihilation by nuclear explosion that was prevalent at that time (the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962). But Lichtenstein was also interested in the way dynamic events like explosions were depicted in the stylised format of comic book illustration. This print incorporates many of the hallmarks of his early painting style: flat primary colours, Benday dots, outlines and schematic drawing.”⁣

 Roy Lichtenstein ⁣ Explosion, from Portfolio 9⁣ 1967⁣

For forty years, until her retirement in 1973, Dorothy Porter built the collections focused on African American history at Howard University into the great Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Trained as a librarian at Howard and Columbia Universities, she was renowned for her tenacity—discovering books, ephemera, and manuscript materials in private collections, from book dealers, in attics, and even in trash cans. In 1930, she married James Amos Porter, a painter and important historian of African American art who was a Howard faculty member. His portrait depicts his wife in front of a Haitian landscape, perhaps referencing their travels to that country.”⁣

(National Portrait Gallery Collection)⁣

 James Amos Porter⁣ Portrait of Dorothy Porter ⁣ 1952⁣ “Born

“This mural is one of Orozco's earliest frescoes, painted for the ground floor of the National Preparatory School (ENP) in Mexico City. Maternity depicts a mother and child; it resembles Renaissance depictions of Mary and the infant Jesus, with the exception of the conspicuous nudity of the mother. Allegorical Boticelli-esque females in deep folds of windblown drapery surround the mother and child. A sensual, reclining nude female turns her back to the viewer as she eats grapes, the fruit associated with Dionysus and celebration. The women are noticeably European: blond and with classical features. The Renaissance influence is striking not only in the representation of the figures themselves but also in the pyramidal composition and the lapis lazuli-colored garment the mother wears, a color traditionally linked to the figure of the Virgin Mary. ⁣

Following the Mexican Revolution, the new government encouraged the production of public art to promote a nationalist program of unity, of the concept of an integrated populace or "Mexicanos." However, Orozco's use of overtly European figures seems to challenge the assertion by an increasingly authoritarian government that equality had been achieved. In this work, the beauty standard is European rather than indigenous. Here we see Orozco subtly critique the very institution that commissioned him for the work. ⁣

This particular mural is of immense value because it is the only surviving one of Orozco's earliest frescoes, as most were destroyed by conservative students at the ENP while others were demolished by Orozco himself. In fact, a group of Catholic women misinterpreted the secular meaning of Maternity, thought it sacrilegious, and attacked it.”⁣