Henri Matisse often painted the same subject in versions that range from relatively realistic to more abstract or schematic. At times the transition from realism to abstraction could be enacted in a single canvas, as is the case with The Italian Woman, the first of many portraits Matisse painted of a professional Italian model named Laurette. The purposefully visible pentimenti and labored convergence of lines bear witness to his perpetual struggle “to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.” Matisse was not interested in capturing momentary impressions; he strove to create an enduring conception.

From the earlier state of the portrait, which depicts a heavier woman, Matisse pared down Laurette’s image, in the process making her less corporeal and more ethereal. Using the conventions of religious painting—a frontal pose, introspective countenance, and flat back-ground devoid of any indication of location—he created an icon of Woman. The emphatic eyes and brow, elongated nose, and pursed lips of her schematic face resemble an African mask, implying that Matisse, like so many Modern artists, equated the idea of Woman with the foreign, exotic, and “primitive”; he continued in this vein, posing the same model with a turban and a mantilla.

The spatial ambiguity of this portrait—the way the arms appear flat while the background overtakes a shoulder, for example—reveals Matisse’s relationship to Paul Cézanne via the bolder experiments of Cubism. In a 1913 portrait of his wife, Matisse had played with the distinctions between volume and plane by including a flattened scarf that wraps around her arm. This treatment anticipates the shawl-like background of The Italian Woman. These paintings recall Cézanne’s series of portraits of Madame Cézanne (one of which was owned by Matisse) both formally and iconographically, although Matisse’s images are more radically schematized and distilled.

The austerity of color and severe reduction of The Italian Woman is characteristic of Matisse’s work from 1914 to 1918. The art historian Pierre Schneider has suggested that these elements embody the artist’s response to the devastation of World War I.

Jennifer Blessing

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2831

Schooled as an architect in his native Santiago, Chile, Matta went to Paris in 1933 to work for the famed modernist architect Le Corbusier. By the mid-1930s, Matta had become friendly with members of the Surrealist circle, and in 1937, influenced by both Surrealist techniques, including automatism, and his architectural training, he left Le Corbusier’s atelier to focus on art. In 1939, Matta fled Europe for New York, where he maintained contact with Surrealist colleagues who also sought refuge in the United States during World War II. In addition, he forged new relationships with many of his contemporaries in the nascent New York School—among them, William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock—and he introduced them to Surrealism firsthand.

While his paintings were sometimes nonobjective, Matta often depicted landscapes conjured from the unconscious that resemble cosmic locales like those popularized by science fiction. He used the terms “inscapes” and “psychological morphologies” to describe these works, which he considered to be maps of the mind or spaces that exist beyond human perception. He developed a technique that involved the use of rags, sponges, and brushes to build up layers of pigment, which he would rub away in various places, thereby uncovering new forms. The physical transformation brought on by this process alluded to the concepts of change and metamorphosis, which are fundamental to his art.

Matta continued to develop this approach in paintings of the 1940s such as Years of Fear (1941), which explored the timely topics of anxiety and destruction. Its abstract, allover composition lacks traditional indications of spatial orientation such as a horizon line, yet it still reads as a landscape. The swirling, dark cloud in the upper right corner is formally suggestive of such cataclysmic events as a volcanic eruption, war or apocalypse, themes that reflected the devastating events unfolding in Europe at that time. He contrasted this expressive aspect of the work with a more rational one, manifest in areas of pure color demarcated by lines and rendered in a more soothing palette of blues, grays, and yellows. The formal tension between logic and emotion parallels the implied struggle on the interior, psychic battlefield to conquer both personal fears and the terror brought on by World War II.

Valerie Hillings

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2838

In the 1940s Rothko, together with his friend Adolph Gottlieb, believed that the painting of myth, with allusions to tragedy, was the proper response to the horrors of war, the Holocaust and the atom bomb. He once wrote, with Friedrich Nietzsche in mind, that ‘only that subject matter is valid which is timeless and tragic’. His intention was to render this not as allegorical device, nor by narrating a Greek myth, but through abstract, allusive and thus more universal forms. The blue and burnt sienna ‘figure’, the grey ground and the yellow circle capped by flames correspond to the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. The bright red may be sacrificial blood.

https://dailyrothko.tumblr.com/post/152388059736/sacrifice-april-1946-watercolor-gouache-and

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Mark Rothko, like William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Theodoros Stamos, combined mythical themes with primordial imagery in order to express universal experiences. In his work of this period evanescent biomorphic shapes float within an atmospheric haze. Resembling rudimentary life forms or primitive subaquatic plants and creatures, these shapes are intended to provide a visible equivalent of images lodged in the subconscious. Though he drew primarily on his innermost sensations, Rothko also looked toward earlier art. The example of Joan Miró is here evoked in the dotted line, the flame, the amorphic personage at the lower left, and in the meandering threadlike tendrils. Overtly representational images have disappeared, signaling a move toward the complete abstraction of Rothko’s mature style. In its horizontal zoning, cloudlike texture, and blurred contours, Sacrifice anticipates his characteristic, fully evolved Color-Field paintings.

https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/works/sacrifice/

Mark Tobey’s animated matrices of brushed line, like the mature works of Jackson Pollock, are allover compositions. That is, unlike conventional representational paintings, they have no discernable center of focus, no single emphasized portion. Even Cubist works maintain vestiges of pictorial illusionism through an increased density of form at their centers. Yet in viewing a work such as Advance of History, the eye moves easily from edge to edge without halting at any particular configuration, dipping, plunging, swirling, and doubling back to pursue the network of dynamic strokes that expand and breathe on the white surface of the paper. The support thus becomes but a portion of a composition that seems to extend beyond the physical limitations of edges or frames.

Although the development of allover compositions in abstract painting is often associated with Pollock, Tobey in fact exhibited works without compositional focus or orientation as early as 1944, two years before Pollock made his first allover painting. In 1935 Tobey introduced his white writing, the characteristic network of white line that covers the surfaces of his works. This innovation followed Tobey’s discovery of Oriental traditions of ink brushwork in China and Japan, where he found himself “freed from form by the influence of the calligraphic.”² The spontaneity and energy conveyed in his first white writing compositions is still evident in the Peggy Guggenheim work, executed nearly thirty years later. But the frenetic impulses of line in early examples, such as Broadway Norm of 1935, have subsided into the more intricate and delicate fabric of lines of varying widths, densities, and color of

Elizabeth C. Childs

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4057

Lida Abdul is a performance and video artist. She and her family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of 1979, and lived as refugees in India and Germany before immigrating to the United States. Based on this experience, Abdul considers herself a nomadic artist, and her films, videos, and installations focus on themes of cultural identity, migration, deconstruction, and displacement.

Abdul first came to the Gardner Museum in 2007. She spent her time writing in the artist apartment, perusing Isabella Stewart Gardner’s journals from her 1883–84 travels through Japan and China, and reading Gardner’s diary from 1875. She also became very interested in the Matisse drawings in the Short Gallery. The following year, Abdul returned for a conversation with writer and 2004 Artist-in-Residence Anne Nivat. The program, Creativity During Wartime, focused on their personal experiences working and creating in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan and their own roles in helping to raise national and international awareness of these conflicts and their tragic effects on non-combatants.

During her return trip, Abdul also spent a week working with a group of Boston Public School third graders at the Tobin School. Most of the students had been in the United States for less than two years, spoke primarily Spanish at home, and, like Abdul, understood what it felt like to have no fixed notion of their own nationhood. Over the course of the week, the children spoke with Abdul about her experiences in Afghanistan, viewed and discussed her work, and participated in art-making projects under her direction. The projects centered on encouraging the students to see everyday objects and ideas through an unconventional lens. The students then visited the Museum with Abdul to discuss how it inspired her as an artist. Abdul also spoke to eighth graders from the Mission Hill School about her experiences as a refugee and her path to becoming a practicing artist. These students, who were beginning to think about their own futures and what it might mean to make a life in art, were excited to hear her her views on the subject. After her presentation, several students stayed after class to share their artwork with her.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/34579

Though a leading voice in the Abstract Expressionist movement and one of their rare women artists to achieve critical and financial success in her lifetime, Joan Mitchell painted in a manner subtly distinct from her Abstract Expressionist peers. Hers was an idiosyncratic style defined by a varied use of color and with a modulated intensity of paint application. Writing of Mitchell's work in comparison with Jackson Pollock's critic and curator Klaus Kertess remarked, "The downward drips and splashes and centralizing arching of her strokes have an in-and-out dynamic that is unlike Pollock's more lateral thrust of paint flung with the canvas on the floor. Pollock’s paintings are more all-engulfing; his ‘I am nature’ is very different than Mitchell’s being with nature in memory."

Such engagement with memory and landscape are embodied in the at once ballet and pugilistic Untitled. As a child, Mitchell, a Chicago-native, frequently visited the Art Institute of Chicago where she became acquainted with Impressionist landscapes by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Though abstracted, aspects of the landscape remain throughout her oeuvre and in the storm-like tempest of marks from which Untitled builds its momentum.

In early 1950s Mitchell moved to New York and quickly became enmeshed in the avant-garde along with Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Franz Kline, participating in important and formative gallery exhibitions including the seminal 1951 9th Street Show. It was only after Mitchell began splitting her time between New York and France in 1955 (ultimately permanently relocating to France later in the decade), however, that Mitchell reached her greatest artistic heights, culminating in the present work. Here, passages of unbridled expression are tempered by strategically placed painterly elements, bringing together gestural flair and the variability and ferocity of the natural world. Rich colors, unmixed on the brush, coalesce together onto the surface, crafting a sense of dimensionality and physicality.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/14064

In a group of works made between 1930 and 1933, Alberto Giacometti used the Surrealist techniques of shocking juxtaposition and the distortion and displacement of anatomical parts to express the fears and urges of the subconscious. The aggressiveness with which the human figure is treated in these fantasies of brutal erotic assault graphically conveys the content. The female, seen in horror and longing as both victim and victimizer of male sexuality, is often a crustacean or insectlike form. Woman with Her Throat Cut is a particularly vicious image: the body is splayed open, disemboweled, arched in a paroxysm of sex and death. Eros and Thanatos, seen here as a single theme, are distinguished and treated separately in two preparatory sketches.

Body parts are translated into schematic abstract forms like those in Cage of 1930–31, which includes the spoon shape of the female torso, the rib and backbone motif, and the pod shape of the phallus. Here a vegetal form resembling the pelvic bone terminates one arm, and a phalluslike spindle, the only movable part, gruesomely anchors the other; the woman’s backbone pins one leg by fusing with it; her slit carotid immobilizes her head. The memory of violence is frozen in the rigidity of rigor mortis. The psychological torment and the sadistic misogyny projected by this sculpture are in startling contrast to the serenity of other contemporaneous pieces by Giacometti, such as Woman Walking.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1424

In contrast to the cluttered assemblage of juxtaposed objects of varying scales in other boxes, Joseph Cornell here creates a coherent miniaturized world. A black painted border on the surface of the glass frames a white palace and serves as a proscenium that invokes the world of theater and spectacle. The title Setting for a Fairy Tale enhances the stage-model associations of the construction. Cornell’s setting is a reproduction of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s engraving, first published in 1576, of the Château de Madrid in Paris. Reproductions of this same engraving appear in at least nine of his palace constructions, for example, Untitled (Pink Palace) of ca. 1946–48. The Peggy Guggenheim work is the first of these boxes, which were created between 1942 and the mid-1950s.

For Cornell, fairy tales had specific associations with the romantic ballet. His favorite ballets included classics such as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Ondine, and, of special relevance to the present discussion, Sleeping Beauty. Cornell’s friend Tamara Toumanova, whom he met in 1940, often performed the role of the Princess Aurora in Sergei Diaghilev’s revival of the ballet Sleeping Beauty by Marius Petipa, with music by Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky.¹ About 1941 the artist made several objects resembling glass Christmas ornaments that contained cutout pictures of Toumanova dancing Aurora. Certain details of Setting for a Fairy Tale, such as the bramble of twigs suggesting a dense forest around the palace, may derive from the Sleeping Beauty story. Both the balletic rendition of the fairy tale and Cornell’s shadow box conjure up fantasies of romantic love and historic pageantry.

In other constructions Cornell invites the viewer’s imaginative participation in the work through means such as a hatch that may be opened or a tempting crank of a hurdy-gurdy that may be turned. In the present construction the imagined participation is not physical, but psychological and creative. The viewer may be playwright, choreographer, director, and performer in the spectacle of his choice. In a careful scrutiny of the work the mirrored surfaces not only offer the illusion of shimmering glass windows, but also engage the viewer in a multifaceted reflection and discovery of oneself.

Elizabeth C. Childs

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/903

"My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is bathed by such piercing light as to provide their present and future with hope."

Louis Faurer

Cezanne's father purchased a large mansion called Jas de Bouffan on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence in 1859. Cezanne stayed frequently in Aix at the beginning of the 1880s where he painted the surroundings of the estate. This work was painted near the back gate of the estate. The undulations that continue from the back entrance and wall to the distant range of mountains are precisely expressed in a long narrow strip of blue, blue green and ochre that maintains Cezanne's firm sense of spatial order.

https://www.nmwa.go.jp/en/collection/1978-0005.html

The late 1870s to the 1880s were a major turning point in the careers of Pissarro and the other Impressionists. We can find evidence of these changes in this Conversation. Here we can see Pissarro's tendency toward pointillist techniques which would be further developed in the later 1880s under Seurat's influence. In terms of subject matter, Pissarro here changes his focus to figures, shifting from his earlier emphasis on the landscape. This work depicts farmers in their everyday surroundings with great validity and familiarity.

https://www.nmwa.go.jp/en/collection/1959-0165.html

The French painter Corot displayed a great originality in lyrical landscape painting. He traveled to Italy three times during his life, but he only visited the subject of this work, Naples, on his first trip. From his several small sketches of Naples Castle, Mt. Vesuvius, Ischia and Amalfi, however, it would seem that this trip to Naples was particularly memorable. This tall rectangular canvas was painted during the artist's late years. The silvery and ethereal color, typical of this period, adds a subtle nuance to the whole composition.

https://www.nmwa.go.jp/en/collection/1970-0003.html