René Magritte: Shades of Things to Come

René Magritte - Bather - 1925 - Oil on canvas - 20 x 39 in - 50 x 100 cm - Palais des beaux-arts de Charleroi, Charleroi, Belgium (click photo for larger image)Belgian artist Renée Magritte (1898-1967) created work that frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The mystery that emerges from this approach is for what he is best known.

In the elegant work featured here, we have a fine example of Magritte's early attempts to find a restrained, illustrative style. We can recognize many of the elements that characterized his later paintings, such as the prominence of the sea and the mysterious sphere in the background. This work also bears the influence of Magritte's professional forays into the world of fashion advertising. Always evident in Magritte’s work is his extraordinary ability as a draughtsman.

You can read about Magritte elsewhere on What About Art?

Picasso: The Last Year

Pablo Picasso - Self-Portrait Facing Death - June 30, 1972 - Crayon on paper (1881-1973) remains—by far—the most prolific artist in the history of art. He was working up until three hours before his death in 1972. During the last two decades of his long career, Picasso produced more work than at any other time of his life. Some works from this period are not only dated by month and day, but with a numeral (I, II, III, etc.) indicating multiple works created in a single day. Always a superstitious man, Picasso truly believed that if he kept working, his life would be prolonged.

His late period tends to be overlooked, but contains some of the finest of Picasso's paintings. Some critics maintain that Picasso was creatively lazy at this point, but a close look at the work suggests quite the opposite. He had achieved a level of effortless artistic expression that has still not been fully appreciated. Moreover, his influence continues to be felt to this day—and will undoubtedly reach into the future. He changed the way we see!

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” - Pablo Picasso

You can read about the great modern master elsewhere on What About Art? and there are numerous websites dedicated to research into his art. Just Google “Picasso” and you’ll see… 

Carlo Carrà: Metaphysical for a Moment

Carlo Carrà - Western Horseman - 1917 - Oil on canvas - 52 x 67 cm - Private CollectionItalian painter Carlo Carrá (1881-1966) was a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art and he taught for many years in the city of Milan. 

In 1917 he met Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara, and worked with him there for several weeks. Influenced by de Chirico, Carrà began including mannequin imagery in his paintings, and together they formed the short-lived “Metaphysical Art Movement”. The work featured here is one of Carrà’s metaphysical works. The movement broke up over a dispute between de Chirico and Carrà over who exactly established it. Ah…the ego of some artists!

By 1919, Carrà's metaphysical phase was giving way to an “archaicism” inspired by the works of Giotto, whom he admired as "the artist whose forms are closest to our manner of conceiving the construction of bodies in space.” However, Carrà is best known for his Futurist works.

Joan Miró: A Language of His Own

Joan Miró - The Farm. 1921-22 - Oil on canvas - 132 x 147 cm. (52 x 58 in.) The National Gallery of Art - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)Spanish Artist Joan Miró (1893-1983)—discussed elsewhere on What About Art?—was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse, and in 1920 he moved to Paris. Under the influence of Surrealist artists, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. He was generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols. But, Miró rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. This strong individualistic streak benefited Miró and accommodated his uniqueness well. He also remained deeply connected to his Catalan roots and would eventually split his year between living in France and his homeland.

Miró’s work featured here presents a view of the artist's masia or "family farm," filled with animals, farm implements, plants, and evidence of human activity. Miró explained, "The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country. I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas - from a huge tree to a tiny snail." The intensity of vision and almost maniacal attention to detail gives the work the quality of a memory reconfigured in a dream, and prefigures his later Surrealist work. Art critic Laura Cummings wrote, "every entity is given its own autonomous space in the picture, separately praised but connected by rhyming shapes," due to the "quasi-cubist space, tilted upright; and presumably because Miró is celebrating the thriving upward growth of home." 

The artist considered this work among his most important, marking a turning point. While reflecting a number of influences, including Catalan folk art, a Romanesque sense of hierarchy where scale reflects importance, and a Cubist vocabulary. 

After completing The Farm, Miró struggled to find a buyer in a Parisian modern art market that preferred Cubism. One dealer suggested cutting it into several smaller paintings for ease of sale. Fortunately, the artist had become friends with the writer Ernest Hemingway, then a struggling unknown, and, after hours of working the two would meet for boxing sessions to unwind. Hemingway was determined to buy The Farm and, after borrowing money and working as a grocery clerk, was able to purchase it. He kept it throughout his life and wrote, "I would not trade it for any picture in the world. It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.”

Gertrude Stein: A Self-Styled Genius

Pablo Picasso - Gertrude Stein - 1905-06 - Oil on canvas - 39-3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkNovelist, poet, and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was born in Pittsburgh. She moved to Paris in 1903 and would spend the rest of her life in the French capital. Stein hosted a salon in Paris where Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many more artists would meet. Together with her brother Leo, Stein created an impressive art collection. Between 1903 and 1914, the siblings accumulated art by Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, Delacroix, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. (You can read more about each of these artists on What About Art?)

Gertrude and Leo would split their collection after they ceased living together, but Gertrude’s reputation in the art world only grew. At the time, art critic Henry McBride wrote that Gertrude “collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a long way off.” Stein was especially appreciative of Pablo Picasso’s work—although she didn’t take to it right from the start. He painted her portrait in 1906—now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and she continued to support his work when it transitioned to Cubism.

Stein was known as a genius in her own right for her own literary work, although her only book to reach a wide public was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was actually Stein’s own autobiography. 

Stein’s importance in the art world cannot be underestimated. Her support of early modern artists helped the careers of many artists who are now considered modern masters. Not at all humble in her estimation of herself, Stein observed, “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.” 

For Picasso, Stein’s early patronage and friendship was critical to his success. He painted this portrait of her between 1905 and 1906 at the end of his so-called "Rose Period." Her body is reduced to simple masses—a foreshadowing of his adoption of Cubism—and portrays her face almost like a mask with heavy lidded eyes, reflecting his recent encounter with Iberian sculpture.