JOAN MIRÓ

In the 1960s, Joan Miró began stripping away anything superfluous until all he was left with was unadulterated expression. Gone were the playful flourishes of his earlier abstractions, the human-like quality of his shapes, the kinetic movement and subtle shading of his figures and planes. In their place, plumbed from the depths of his consciousness, was simplicity. The flight of the dragonfly needs nothing more than a line to speak of its movement and it is dwarfed by the enormity, and irregularity, of the sun. Miro began to paint not seeking representation or even emotion but a sort of unplaceable familiarity. If he reduced the world around him to core elements, and depicted the world as filtered through memory and experience, he could capture the purest essence of existence. The flight of the dragonfly is not about the dragonfly but about how both the smallest being and the largest concepts should take up the same space together.

PAUL KLEE

‘First of all,’, said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, ‘the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.’ Of course, Illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky – Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page.

JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCIA

There are no contradictions. Nothing is incompatible. These were the tenets that guided Torres-Garcia’s life, the life of a writer, painter, sculptor, teacher, theorist, muralist, novelist and architect; a renaissance man of the highest order. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain in 1891 and began a career as an artist. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found numerous schools, groups and movements including the first European Abstract art group and push the art and culture of Europe and South America to its vanguard. It was the duality of his homeland and his adopted nations that drove Torres-Garcia, and his ability to hold this duality together in a single mind. He existed between places, carrying the identity of Uruguay with him everywhere, and in doing so he was able too to carry the new and the old, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction. There are no contradictions, he said, nothing is incompatible.