149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America. Julian Porter
grids caught the public attention around 1958 at her first one-woman show. She combined her free-hand, graphite lines with coloured bands on a square six-foot canvas. She used delicacy and precision to complete these organic masterpieces. The structural, white pencil markings never touch the edge of the canvas, creating a fluidity between materials and ideas, a shimmering unification of sorts.
Battling schizophrenia, Martin ultimately moved to New Mexico, where she built her own home single-handedly but did no painting. She began painting again in 1974 but her grid style was no more. Horizontal and vertical stripes of warm colour replaced the simple style she had perfected.
Untitled #12 (1977) was painted in a fifteen-part series on canvas. The series abandoned her original technique in exchange for a hand-drawn painting, exhibiting a subtle gradation of light. Titles that had been focused solely on nature had changed to express love and life. She worked into her nineties, she died in 2004, and her work endures.
SG
22. City Landscape (1955)
Joan Mitchell (1925–92)
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955
Oil on linen, 203.2 x 203.2 cm
Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art (1958.193)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© Estate of Joan Mitchell
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Does this look like a city landscape to you? Would it without the title? It does to me. The painting evokes the nervous energy a large metropolis radiates, neon and all.
Chicago-born, Joan Mitchell took inspiration for her foray into Abstract Expressionism from heavyweights like de Kooning and, earlier, from Kandinsky, Matisse, and Cézanne. She had intended to study with Hans Hofmann but found his teaching technique too intimidating and ventured elsewhere.
After a European stint, she found her artistic voice and called her new works “Expressionist Landscapes.” A tough woman, she refused to be ignored in the male-dominated art scene of 1950s New York. With great irony, she referred to herself as a “Lady Painter,” mocking her contemporaries who failed to take her seriously as an artist.
Refusing the hew to the conventional wisdom of flatness on the canvass, Mitchell continually returned to the tradition of figure and ground, almost always alluding to landscape, however unrecognizable. The oil-on-linen City Landscape hues of soft pink, mustard yellow, warm orange, and black in their short brush strokes create a sense of chaos as they intensify toward the middle of the canvas. Ambient light surrounds the metropolis. You can feel the frisson , the pulsating excitement, as you are swirled into the epicentre.
Mitchell said of her work, “I paint a little, then I sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do.” She lived the last part of her rich life with Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, but their works never seem a reflection of the other’s, each always hewing to her and his artistic vision.
A timeless artist, Mitchell’s Untitled (1960) sold at auction in 2014 for $11.9 million, a record for a “Lady Painter.”
Mitchell is also exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, but City Landscape is not to be missed.
SG
23. Woman at Her Toilette (1875–80)
Berthe Morisot (1841–95)
Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, 1875–80
Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 80.4 cm
Stickney Fund (1924.127)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Some pictures pop up out of nowhere.
In March 2016, Waldemar Januszcak, a British art commentator, picked the one hundred greatest works of art in THE WORLD. Well, I look. Berthe Morisot, Young Woman at Her Toilette, “The most talented of the female Impressionist painters worked with brush strokes so dashing and inventive and brave, they set your pulse racing.”
Look at it. If ever a painting deserves the praise, “a salad of feathery strokes,” this is it. Shades of lavender, pink, blue, white, and grey. The black choker takes your eye away from the yellow rose on the table. All a flutter of femininity yet a discipline in the brushing. Magic.
Berthe Morisot, a member of the Impressionists, had a picture selected by the establishment Salon as early as 1867, the year she posed for Manet in the famous Balcony. In Manet’s hallmark picture (Musée D’Orsay), she is a riveting beauty with a black choker, ringlets of raven black hair, and sizzling dark eyes. She was the legendary Fragonard’s great niece and became Manet’s sister-in-law. She survived the 1870–71 Commune in Paris when the Germans slaughtered many French civilians. Paris was stripped of trees and lights, people were starving, and rat paté or cat stew was survival. Cholera lurked.
In 1874 Pissarro put on the first group exhibition of what became known as the Impressionists. She entered nine works, Degas ten, Monet nine, Cézanne but three. She was a regular exhibitor until its last show in 1886.
She was a great friend of Manet and a subject of many of his portraits. She was close to Degas. In one of her letters to her sister, she reveals a Jane Austen–like quality:
Monsieur Degas seemed happy but guess for whom he forsook me — for Mademoiselle Lille and Madame Loubens. I must admit I was a little annoyed when a man whom I consider to be very intelligent deserted me to pay compliments to two silly women.
… For about an hour Manet was leading his wife and me all over the place … what is more I had completely lost sight of Manet and his wife, which further increased my embarrassment. I did not think it proper to walk around all alone. When I finally found Manet again I reproached him for his behaviour.2
A young poet said, “When I am near Madame Manet I feel like an uncouth lout.”3
After Morisot’s death Renoir, Monet, and Degas organized a retrospective exhibition of her works.
JP
Ascending and Descending Hero (1965)
Bridget Riley (1931–)
Bridget Riley,
Ascending and Descending Hero, 1965
Acrylic emulsion on canvas, 72 x 108 in.
Gift of Society for Contemporary Art (1968.102)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© Bridget Riley 2017. All rights reserved,
courtesy Karsten Schubert, London
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago
Doesn’t look like much, does it? Is it even art? Well, is it something that attracts the eye? Does it speak to the senses, even causing aggravation? Is it arranged in an arresting way? Does it make you think? Does it make you feel? If so, surely it’s art.
Bridget Riley was one of the youngest, most driven, and most influential women in the modern art world. In 1931, in Cornwall, England, during the Second World War, she fell in love with the outdoors. She was intrigued by the constant changes in light and colour and cloud formation and admired the world around her from a young age.
After her father was seriously injured in a car accident, she spun into a complete mental and physical breakdown. She was out of touch, and out of mind, something she had never experienced.