JACKSON POLLOCK

Jackson Pollock was rediscovering his creativity after a long battle with alcoholism and an adjustment to his newfound fame. Recently moved in with his new wife Lee Krasner, he allowed himself to experiment and bring in forgotten elements of his work. He began to draw again, and exercise greater control and restraint over his work. The automatic works of the abstract subconscious merged with his draughtsman origins. He combined passion with rigour to create these sparse and lyrical paintings, no less affecting than his preceding works. He began also to reintroduce bodily figures, contorted and distressed, they bring Pollock out of representations of his mind and place him as a person in the canvas and the world. It is perhaps not surprising that these figures come into his oeuvre after he has got sober and settled, his internal fight has waned, and he can see himself as part of the wider world. On the right-hand side, the enamel paint is dispensed with a turkey baster and allows collaboration with his materials. No. 7 can be seen as a dialogue between a past Pollock and a present one, and an ability for the two to live in harmony.

PABLO PICASSO

In a deep depression, Picasso could paint in nothing but blue. For three years, he works became all but monochromatic; rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, they are overwhelming in their coldness and affecting in the totality of moroseness they represent. It was the suicide of a close friend that led Picasso into his aptly named ‘Blue Period’, and his art was changed not just in palette but in subject. He retreated into the darkness of society, finding solace in the outcasts: the sick, disabled, marginalised, and rejected, as he saw himself in his misery as equally apart from the world he once inhabited. The works made during this period are more than melancholy - they are entirely absent of joy, and amongst the most urgent and potent communications of sadness ever created. This work, of an older man, ailing with little food to eat, is an exemplary work of this period. There is something unsettling in his depiction, as he moves between dimensions his body seems to exist both as rounded, fully formed flesh in the face, neck and hands, and as a flat, false image in his torso and arms. The table appears to retreat back against the wall, trapping him in a purgatorial space between planes. In social position and depiction, Picasso’s unnamed subject exists as an outsider, unplaced within the physical world he is painted in and rejected by the one he inhabits.

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK

Vlaminck ignored the details. From an early age he rejected the traditional teaching methods of copying masterpieces from museums, keen to make sure that his inspiration was pure and his style unadulterated by influence. Landscapes were but a vehicle for a violent expression told through brushstrokes. The subjects of the scenes were carefully considered but Vlaminck felt no allegiance or responsibility towards them, in both landscape and portraiture. Instead, he was deeply committed to himself, and prioritised the authenticity of his own expression above all else. A lifelong fauvist, art was for him a wild and personal thing, and he saw Picasso and Braques cubism as a dead-end that dragged painting into a state of confusion, away from the expression of human emotion and into something all the headier and more distant. This painting of Vue Saint Maurice tells us little of the road, but in the furious snow and aggressive sky, we learn a lot about Vlaminck.