Now synonymous with Russian music, the name “Tchaikovsky” once attracted controversy in his native country and beyond. Listeners ever since his lifetime (1840-1893) have tussled over how Russian or Western his music is, how innovative or traditional it is, and how much it reveals his personal life. From his ill-fated marriage to his untimely death, Tchaikovsky’s life has been persistently read into his music, but is music just a diary of feeling? What made Tchaikovsky remarkable, and how did he come to compose some of the world’s best-loved music? These five foundational compositions track the volatile trajectory of a tragic genius who revolutionized classical music while wrestling with his own internal

1. Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ Minor, Op. 23 and the Triumph Over Rejection

Firstly, it’s important to understand the conditions for Russian composers in the mid-19th century, when Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in 1840 and initially trained as a lawyer, began to write music.

No Russian composers were known worldwide, nor even across much of Russia itself, until the success of the opera composer Mikhail Glinka in the first half of the 19th century. By and large, Russian composition encompassed folk and sacred music, whose composers were not as prominent as those of classical music or what is sometimes called art music (such as operas, symphonies, concerti, and sonatas), to be played for contemplation, leisure, and entertainment.

The pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein is a good example of the exodus of musicians from Russia at this time due to lack of opportunity, having made his name in Western Europe where patrons and institutions were more readily available to support music. Returning to Russia in mid-century, Rubinstein was determined to change the musical landscape. He set up Moscow‘s Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, where he and his brother Nikolai taught, among others, the young Tchaikovsky.

Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was written for Nikolai Rubinstein, a piano virtuoso like his brother (concerti are traditionally three-movement showpieces written for one solo instrument backed by an orchestra). But Rubinstein initially disparaged the piece and refused to give its debut performance. Possibly, this was to do with the unorthodox but distinctive horn introduction to the first movement, which takes place not in the piece’s key of B♭ minor but in its relative major, D♭ major. Rubinstein branded the piece messy, derivative, and, worst of all, unplayable.

Tchaikovsky (refusing to submit to Rubinstein’s demands to alter the piece) sought another pianist, Hans von Bülow, who ended up premiering the piece in Boston in 1875, where it was a great success. Although Rubinstein soon came around, the incident with the First Piano Concerto was just the first time Tchaikovsky would find greater success abroad than at home and stir up debates about what Russian composition ought to sound like.

2. Swan Lake and the Melancholy of Forbidden Love

Both Tchaikovsky’s most famous work and one of the most famous ballets of all time, Swan Lake tells the tragic tale of the love between Prince Siegfried and Odette, a beautiful woman who has been turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer.

While trying to break the curse, Siegfried is led astray by Odile, the sorcerer’s daughter and Odette’s doppelgänger. The ballet’s apotheosis is Odette’s heartbroken vow to die following Siegfried’s betrayal rather than remain a swan for eternity, and Siegfried’s resolution to join her in plunging into the lake.

Swan Lake unites a timeless story of impossible love with the enchantments of fairy tale, a visually entrancing spectacle (with particularly demanding roles for the ballerina portraying Odette and, often the same person, Odile), and some of Tchaikovsky’s most beguiling music. That said, it was not a roaring success on its premiere in Moscow in 1877. Initial critics took issue with the ballet in part because it was a little too German for their liking.

Swan Lake did have various German influences. Reports differ as to the author of the ballet’s original libretto, but the story has much in common with German fairytales, and with other nineteenth-century ballets from France, for instance, which tended to be set in Germany. This reflects Germany’s prominence in this period within the Europe-wide movement towards rediscovering national myths, legends, and fairytale or folk material—Richard Wagner‘s four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, was a notorious and epic revival of German legend.

Tchaikovsky was influenced by Wagner’s operas, which feature a hero named Siegfried who unwittingly betrays his true love, and which elsewhere (in Lohengrin and Parsifal) use the swan as a symbol of innocence, purity, and sacrifice. Like Wagner, Tchaikovsky dotted leitmotifs throughout his score, associating a passage of music with a specific character or idea, even giving each main character their own key. The plaintive Swan Theme, played on the oboe in B minor (the key associated with the Swan Maidens), is now one of the most beloved passages in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre, but at the time contributed to critical opinion that the work was too Wagnerian.

Another German influence on the ballet was Wagner’s friend and patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig styled himself as a Swan King during his increasingly reclusive life, bedecking his castles (including Neuschwanstein, or New Swan Rock) with swan imagery drawn from fairytales and Wagner’s operas. The association was later compounded when Ludwig, in mysterious circumstances, died by drowning in a lake.

Tchaikovsky may have seen Ludwig as a prototype for Prince Siegfried, who is not only enamored by a swan maiden but, at the beginning of the ballet, highly averse to marriage. In Ludwig’s case, and Tchaikovsky’s own, though neither could voice it openly, this aversion to marriage was a result of their homosexuality, and audiences of Swan Lake have long interpreted its story of thwarted love as a coded expression of gay desire (Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret in his lifetime, more on which below). This has led to reinterpretations such as Matthew Bourne’s 1995 all-male staging of the ballet.

3. Eugene Onegin and the Reflection of Life’s Pathos

Tchaikovsky tended to work quickly once he had fixed on an idea. Full of excitement, he completed Swan Lake in a year. It took even less time to write Eugene Onegin, an opera first performed in 1879. In 1877, he wrote to his brother that he had more or less drafted the entire outline in one sleepless night after someone suggested he adapt Alexander Pushkin‘s novel of the same name. By early 1878, the whole opera was written.

In choosing a magnum opus by Pushkin, one of Russia’s most revered literary figures, Tchaikovsky signaled a dedication to Russian source material that may have been intended to contradict some of his detractors.

Since around 1862, the year Anton Rubinstein founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the Russian music world had been disrupted by a group of young, idealistic, self-taught composers known as The Five (or, as their champion critic Vladimir Stasov crowned them, the moguchaya kuchka, or Mighty Handful). These five men, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin, wanted to challenge the primacy of Western compositional techniques and steer Russian music towards the current of musical nationalism then beginning to spread throughout Europe.

As mentioned already, Russian musicians at mid-century often found their fortunes abroad, and favored a cosmopolitan approach to composition. The Five took aim at academic musicians, such as Tchaikovsky, whose talents had been nurtured in conservatories founded on Western traditions. They called for Russian music which incorporated folk material, reinvigorating tunes collected from across the Russian empire, and following programs (that is, being based on specific texts) about Russian stories and characters.

Eugene Onegin was not Tchaikovsky’s first opera nor his first attempt at tackling a Russian story, but it was the first time he had felt truly inspired by his text. Friends and family remarked that Eugene Onegin was an unusual choice for an opera, since it was relatively lacking in action, but Tchaikovsky insisted that Pushkin’s poetry would serve him well in crafting a work of high art.

Seemingly no more than a tale of a pair of jealous lovers, a fatal duel (an echo of Pushkin’s own life), and a later meeting between Onegin and his love, Tatyana, who has become a rich woman after rejecting him, the opera is full of passion and pathos. It also seemed to resonate with the composer’s own life. During its composition, he received a love letter from a former student, Antonina Miliukova, resembling a scene in the opera in which Tatyana sends Onegin a love letter. Preoccupied with a worry that he, like his opera’s hero, might act “incomparably basely” towards someone who loved him, he married Antonina.

The marriage was over long before Eugene Onegin premiered. Marriage, attractive to “shut the mouths” of those whispering about his homosexuality but otherwise an impossible prospect, caused Tchaikovsky a nervous breakdown, and the two lived together for under two months before separating.

Eugene Onegin may have been a series of episodes centered on a small cast of characters and their emotional lives, rather than high drama, but Tchaikovsky was drawn to the story because of the simplicity and universality of these emotions. Although it once again took off outside Russia first (particularly under the baton of Gustav Mahler), it is now widely performed both inside and outside Russia, testifying to its composer’s ability to bridge the divergent schools of thought about composition in his day.

4. The Nutcracker as a Bittersweet Escape From Reality

Many of Tchaikovsky’s works, including an early version of Swan Lake, had their origins in compositions for his family, with whom he was very close. His most family-oriented work, though, is the ballet The Nutcracker, indelibly associated with Christmas for children across the globe.

First performed in 1892, The Nutcracker was based on a story by Alexandre Dumas which was itself an adaptation of an original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann. While Hoffmann’s stories often have an undercurrent of the uncanny which might disturb us as adults, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was nevertheless full of delectable delights just waiting to be put on the stage, from the title character (a model soldier which comes to life) to a battle between the toy soldiers and the Mouse King, to the heroine Clara’s travels in the Land of Sweets.

The Nutcracker is in the ballet-féerie, or fairy-ballet tradition, in which emphasis tends to fall on spectacular stage effects and sumptuous, sugary accompanying music. In 1924, fellow Russian composer Igor Stravinsky defended The Nutcracker against the negative connotations of ballet-féerie, calling its orchestration “so delicate and so original” (Hess 2001, 190). He went on: “Tchaikovsky is very easy, and for this reason he has been considered common. In reality, he is the most Russian composer of all the musicians of my country.”

Certainly, The Nutcracker contains Tchaikovsky’s most “easy” music, and has made him “common” in the sense of widely appreciated, especially after much of its score featured in the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia. The ballet is replete with melodies which demonstrate the composer’s unparalleled ear for a tune, from the divertissements (short, light pieces of music) representing different sweets to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” This latter piece is notable for featuring the celesta, a keyboard instrument with a bell-like sound which Tchaikovsky had heard while traveling in Paris.

It was also in Paris, in 1891, that Tchaikovsky heard of the death of his only sister, Sasha, and this may have had an influence on his representation of the young girl Clara in The Nutcracker, as he remembered idyllic festive seasons from his own childhood. There is real pathos in the pas de deux performed by the Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier, who act as stand-ins for the Nutcracker and Clara in her childish imaginings, as she realizes her adventures have been but the dream of an enchanted Christmas Eve; all to the tune of one of Tchaikovsky’s most heart-rending melodies.

5. Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 and the Haunting Pathétique Requiem

No piece in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre has invited more speculation about the links between life and work than his Symphony No. 6, often known by its subtitle, the Pathétique Symphony. But even starting with the title, we run into problems of interpretation. The French word pathétique, conveying pathos and tragedy, was a translation of the Russian word pateticheskaya, which more closely suggests high emotions and passion. Should we hear the piece as simply passionate, or specifically tragic?

Then, still before we get to the music, we have the symphony’s dedication to Tchaikovsky’s nephew Vladimir Davydov (nicknamed Bob). In the last five years of his life, Tchaikovsky grew especially close to Bob, writing besotted letters which included lines like: “If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me,” and “The thought that this paper is going to be in your hands fills me with joy and brings tears to my eyes.”

It has been common to interpret the Sixth Symphony as an expression of Tchaikovsky’s homosexual desires. E. M. Forster interpolated it throughout his gay novel Maurice, published in 1970, with one character jokingly calling it the Pathic Symphony, a tongue-in-cheek reference to an archaic classical term for gay men.

Moreover, listeners have heard the symphony as representing Tchaikovsky’s anguish over these feelings, specifically because he and Bob could not be together, and more generally because he could not be openly gay.

This accounts, some say, for the symphony’s first movement interpolating funereal music from the Russian Orthodox tradition, its devastating fourth and final movement, marked adagio lamentoso, and its ending with the direction morendo, or “dying away.” It was unusual for the fourth movement to be slow, rather than the second, as customarily, and even more unusual for this fourth movement to end on a dying minor chord.

Other listeners, such as the critic Richard Taruskin, have argued against over-determining the symphony in terms of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality. The Russian Silver Age of the late 19th century was backed by the aristocracy, among whom homosexuality was prevalent and largely tolerated as long as it was discreet. Taruskin argues that this attitude was extended to artists they patronized, such as Tchaikovsky. The composer’s friends and family were aware of his orientation (his brother Modest was also, more openly, gay) and some have commented that, with the exception of the anguish over his marriage, Tchaikovsky lived a relatively comfortable, if covert, gay life.

For Taruskin, a far more important factor in responses to the Sixth Symphony (including reviews branding it hysterical and effeminate) was not the composer’s sexuality but his nationality. Accusations of effeminacy in the Sixth Symphony came largely from English-language reviewers, who found Tchaikovsky’s music too Russian. Meanwhile, we saw from the responses to Swan Lake that critics were more concerned with German influences than possible gay subtext.

Nonetheless, both sympathetic and hostile listeners continue to associate the Sixth Symphony with Tchaikovsky’s personal life because the composer died in suspicious circumstances just seven days after conducting its premiere in 1893. The symphony’s second performance shortly afterward was thus open to far more morbid interpretations, coupled with the ‘dying’ tones of the music itself, and these have continued to stick.

Officially, Tchaikovsky was said to have died of cholera after drinking unsafe, unboiled water at a restaurant. This was called into question at the time in Russia, perhaps partly because cholera was stigmatized as a lower-class disease and such a prominent cultural figure could not be seen to have succumbed to it. Some questioned how Tchaikovsky had obtained unsafe water at the restaurant during a cholera outbreak.

Rumors quickly spread that Tchaikovsky had either been poisoned or ordered to kill himself by a “court of honor” or the Tsar because of his homosexuality. However, the widespread tolerance of homosexuality among the aristocracy and those they patronized calls this theory into question, especially since, by 1893, Tchaikovsky was one of Russia’s foremost cultural representatives, having received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge and conducted his music at the grand opening of the Carnegie Hall in New York.

Others suggest that Tchaikovsky killed himself because his feelings for Bob had become intolerable, an anguish audible in the Sixth Symphony, with its dedication to the unattainable beloved. But how did Tchaikovsky know where to obtain unsafe water and that it would certainly kill him? How can this be reconciled with a story Taruskin narrates of the composer, shortly after conducting the symphony’s premiere, rejecting the horrors of mortality and stating, “I feel I shall live a long time”?

Whatever the truth of Tchaikovsky’s untimely death aged just 53, which may never be definitively explained, the Sixth Symphony or Pathétique remains a bittersweet, exceptionally haunting work, regardless of whether we wish to hear it in light of his homosexuality, his turbulent relationship with Russian national identity, and his subsequent death, or whether we choose to just listen to the music.

Source

• Hess, Carol (2001). Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898–1936.

Contemporary American artist Janine Antoni defies the borders of conventional art by challenging human perception and physical senses. Through her complex installations and photographic projects, Antoni explores the transformation of materials and the physical presence of a body in space. Many of her works relate to notions of femininity and motherhood. Read on to get familiar with seven remarkable works by Janine Antoni.

1. Gnaw, 1992: The First Groundbreaking Work by Janine Antoni

Born in the Bahamas, Janine Antoni moved to Florida in her teens and received her artistic training there. As a foreigner, she paid extreme attention to the acts and motions that made her different from others. She also noticed the interaction of the body with space, known or unfamiliar. Upon discovering the works by Ana Mendieta in her student years, Antoni was anxious about the potential of her artistic career. She believed Mendieta, as well as other, then almost unknown, feminist artists working with their own bodies and natural materials, have said it all already. Still, she realized how unjustly ignored artists like Mendieta were, and continued to develop her expressive language.

One of the first works by Janine Antoni that made her a recognized contemporary artist was the 1992 installation Gnaw. The artist took two cubes of lard and chocolate, 600 pounds each, and reshaped them using her teeth. Antoni then melted the chewed chocolate to cast 27 heart-shaped packages, and the chewed lard to create 135 tubes of bright red lipstick by mixing it with beeswax and pigment.

Despite her obvious tactile involvement in the work, Antoni never shared images of her actually chewing the chocolate. This was a deliberate gesture: an image of the artist crouched on the floor with her teeth sunken into the 600 lb cube of chocolate would irreparably ruin the viewer’s focus. Antoni’s idea was to concentrate her audience on the tactile qualities of the piece, imagining their own interaction with it and observing the bite marks.

Gnaw is the exercise in tactile perception, referencing the way babies perceive the world by chewing objects, and exploring the borders of the desired and the repulsive. Chocolate, lipsticks, and heart-shaped trinkets are all associated with femininity as something desirable and appealing, while lard and saliva, inevitably present in the installation, tend to repulse the onlooker. Moreover, Antoni marks lard as the feminine-coded material due to a higher fat percentage than men. By chewing on lard and turning it into makeup, the artist reflects on the cannibalistic side of beauty standards and desire.

2. Lick and Lather, 1993

Similarly to Gnaw, Lick and Lather explored the concept of transformation—both material and conceptual. She cast a series of life-sized bust self-portraits, seven from chocolate, and seven from soap. Identical at first, soon they became nothing alike, as the artist reshaped them through the natural intended use of their materials. She licked chocolate and bathed with soap, and soon the figures lost their precise contours and gained individuality. By reshaping her face and body, the artist distanced herself from her self-portraits. Traditionally, cast sculptures have been perceived as the direct reflection of the natural world, but in Antoni’s case, they keep living and transforming independently.

Both eating and bathing are regarded as self-care practices. Through them, Antoni destroys and alters her own reproduced images: caring for her real self, she compromises the copies. The traditional bust form is as important as the transformation of materials: the licked chocolate surface resembles patina and scratches on aging bronze sculptures. Decades later, Antoni would use the molds left from the Lick and Lather project in her installations, reinventing not only her old art but her old self, in appearance and identity.

3. Loving Care, 1993

Unlike the previous two works mentioned on this list, Loving Care required the artist’s presence and direct observation of her actions. During the performance, the artist dipped her hair in Loving Care hair dye and painted the floor with it as a brush. Gradually, she covered the entire floor with paint, pushing the visitors out of the gallery room. Thus, the artist was not only present in the scene but actively claimed the space for her work and expression. The act was not only about painting but also mopping: she recalled how her mother wiped the kitchen floor, pushing everyone outside. For a few minutes, the kitchen space was entirely hers—reclaimed and occupied.

Loving Care also referenced iconic works of art and styles of the 20th century. The broad strokes made by Antoni’s hair looked too familiar to monumental Abstract Expressionist canvases. Another reference was the art of Nouveau Realisme master Yves Klein. Klein used female models as his brushes, covering their nude bodies in paint and asking them to roll on the stretched canvas. These models were passive instruments that helped realize the idea of a great male artist and were stripped of their agency. Antoni, on the contrary, takes the initiative in her own hands and uses her own body on her own terms.

4. Slumber, 1994

One of the most famous and critically renowned works by Janine Antoni, Slumber once again blended public with private and explored the activities traditionally identified as feminine. For several weeks, Antoni spent her nights inside the art gallery space with an electroencephalograph attached to her head to record her eye movement during sleep. Each morning, she weaved the REM data from the machine into a blanket she would cover herself with the following night. The blanket could never be finished completely, only interrupted by the artist’s conscious choice or her death. In Slumber, Antoni both crafted her dreams and let them comfort her sleep. Since the piece was essential performative, she made a very private and individualized act public and visible using both traditional techniques and modern technology.

5. 2038, 2000

This photographic print features the artist lying down in a bathtub next to a group of cows, one of which Antoni is seemingly nursing. The number 2038 is seen on the cow’s ear tag and it’s the only piece of information about the animal. The anonymous existence of 2038 is completely subject to the desires and needs of human beings who see her as a source of milk, meat, and hide. This way, Janine Antoni brings her relationship with a cow full circle—the roles of a wet nurse and her surrogate child are reversed.

The topic of nurture and the physical and mental connection between mother and child have long preoccupied Antoni. Antoni’s mother was an experienced midwife who kept models of bones and organs in their home. The artist was always fascinated with the ways human physicality shaped their mental states and conventions and vice versa. Her experience became augmented with the birth of her daughter in 2004, after which Antoni dived further into works relating to pregnancy and childbirth.

6. Like Lazarus Did, 2013

Like Lazarus Did was a collaborative project centered around a dance performance by a New York choreographer Stephen Petronio. The principal subject matter revolved around the Biblical myth of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus of Bethany four days after his death. The choreography was centered around concepts of rebirth, resurrection, and ascension to the higher plane of spiritual existence.

Janine Antoni’s role in the dance performance was counterintuitive, as she lay motionless in a helicopter stretch fixed above the stage. Over the artist’s head, casts of her own body parts were hung as ornaments in an infant’s crib. For hours, Antoni closely observed her physical body detached and suspended. The idea to create these elements came to the artist through her exploration of Catholic religious objects. In some regions, mostly Spanish-speaking devoted Catholics would purchase or create small copies of body parts that related to their prayer’s intention or desired result, both literally and metaphorically. A person would buy a leg-shaped charm to both heal an injured leg and ask for good luck for an upcoming trip.

7. Janine Antoni’s Cemetery Installation: I Am Fertile Ground, 2019

Janine Antoni designed this complex and site-specific installation for the Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Under the cemetery, vast, uninviting, and cold catacombs stretch. As Antoni stated, the catacombs are the place where bodies are aware of their mortality and dread it. Instead of unraveling the terror, the artist chose to represent our mortal bodies as sacred by positioning images of their parts over the catacombs’ labyrinth.

Antoni decorates her work in the form of gilded Baroque altarpieces, yet keeps them distinctively small and delicate. Painted images of hands, feet, torsos, and hips, celebrate the body as something mysterious and sacred. Each body part performs a gesture that Antoni developed through her own dance practice, adding a ritualistic component to the work. The title hints at the inevitable return of the body into the ground that produced the union that should be revered, not feared. The original exhibit of the artwork in 2020 featured a dance performance that united the dancers’ bodies with the natural elements.

Maya Deren’s films incorporate choreography and hallucinatory cinematography to challenge perceptions and transform the visual experience into a surrealist dance between dreams and reality. Her work merges the spoken and unspoken in filmic fashion, solidifying her place in arthouse cinema history. While Meshes of the Afternoon may be her best-known film, Deren had a more profound effect on experimental cinema than a single title might suggest. As a trailblazer in the 1940s and 1950s cinematic milieu of the United States, Deren’s work inspired many experimental female filmmakers.

Maya Deren’s Origins

Born Eleanora Derenowsky in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1917 to Jewish parents, the filmmaker and her family fled the country due to fears surrounding anti-semitism. After immigrating to the United States, the family changed their last name to Deren to avoid any further anti-semitic sentiments. Deren spent her adolescence between Europe and the United States before deciding to study journalism and political science at Syracuse University in 1933. She would later move to New York City in 1935 with her first husband, social activist Gregory Bardacke, and complete her Bachelor’s at New York University. In 1939, Deren would get a Master’s in English Literature from Smith College, writing her thesis on symbolism in English and French poetry.

Beginnings in Filmmaking

The breadth and scope of her studies would set the foundation for a soon-to-be filmmaker who would bring global perspectives to art-house cinema, a realm where she would make her debut with her artistic name, Maya. While living in New York and completing her studies, Deren worked as an editorial assistant and freelance photographer. Her passion for storytelling and visual imagery motivated her to seek out new subjects to explore and document.

In time, the filmmaker was introduced to Katherine Dunham, a prominent figure in the American modern dance community and a Caribbean culture and dance anthropologist. Deren began traveling as Dunham’s assistant, documenting and studying the mythology and ritualistic attributes of dance. While in Hollywood, she would meet her second husband, seasoned filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who welcomed her into the burgeoning avant-garde film movement of the era.

Altering Reality Through Experimental Cinematography

In 1943, Maya Deren purchased a 16-mm Bolex camera using money she inherited from her father’s passing. Fully immersed in the film scene on the fringes of Hollywood, she began piecing together ideas and working together with Hammid on what would be her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The joining together of their talents, Deren with her poetic temperament and Hammid with his technical camera abilities, paved the way for their new and imaginative approach to cinema. In Meshes, this unique approach to cinematography is seen in frames that oscillate between mirroring and distorting the action of the film, shifting perspectives, and bending time in the on-screen world. Her novel and avant-garde approach to editing remains a common theme in her films, regardless of their focus. Deren’s spatial disruption and defiance of time would inspire many filmmakers to play with time and space for years to come.

Exploration of the Psyche and Freudian Images

Within Deren’s cinematic world, dreams are a playground for delving into and examining unconscious feelings, fears, and repulsion. Freudian images abound, especially in Meshes, where a knife attack from Hammid is a clear allusion to the psychological death Freud often connected to sex and the phallus. Through her introspection about celluloid suicide, which also appears in this film, Deren broaches the subject of identity, alluding to protofeminist ideas surrounding women’s role in society and domesticity. Nonetheless, sex is not always tied to death, whether real or imagined. In Ritual Transfigured in Time (1945), Deren delves further into the human psyche with the help of dancers Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook, as well as writer Anaïs Nin. Through the use of Greek mythology, slow camera movements, and dance, the filmmaker scrutinizes the almost primitive nature of courting rituals and how they relate to female sexuality.

Examining Social Rituals via Cinematic Sequences

It was not only her willingness to submerge viewers in the depths of the mind that made Deren’s films so groundbreaking, but also her propensity to spark conversations around social rituals. In At Land (1944), the filmmaker assays pressures to follow social cues in order to gain acceptance. The film takes place by the seaside, providing a rhythmic backdrop to the interplay between the seen and the unseen in the external world. As the protagonist of the film, Deren takes on the persona of a wild, mermaidlike figure who happens upon a dinner party at the seashore and is rejected by the partygoers because of her uncivilized disposition. Deren’s work is often divided into two sections, her early and late films. Most of her later work is ethnographic and documents Haitian vodun rituals. Still, the filmmaker’s modernist flair and interest rituals remain constant in her later films.

Dance and Poetry’s Influence on Deren’s Films

If there is one element that is present in all of her films, it is rhythm. Many attribute Deren’s unique cadences to her background in poetry and literature as well as her passion for dance, which lend an almost trancelike and hypnotizing quality to her films’ montage. Through the lens of dance and stanza-like structure shaping her films like poems, Deren reimagined the cinematic experience of the time. Furthermore, the references to Surrealism in the filmmaker’s oeuvre are undeniable. The combination of movement and a desire to subvert the conventional as well as redefine structure is evidenced in almost all of her early films. Deren herself detailed how film at its core provides an ideal parallel for poetry through its montage in the Poetry and Film symposium in New York City in 1953. However, her skillful marriage of the visual and the literary remains a hallmark of her filmmaking.

The Inescapable Element of Performance

Nearly all of Maya Deren’s films feature performance to some degree, be it through dance or some other type of choreography. Naturally, the film’s montage and editing also pay homage to performance and the filmmaker’s obsession with movement. Often the main performer in her early films, the filmmaker physically embodies the intrinsic power of performance and idolizes it.

In A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945), the camera itself plays the role of a performer during the opening scene, starting the film off by rotating 360 degrees to capture choreographer Talley Beatty’s movements. Dropping the viewer directly into the ritualistic essence of dance, The Very Eye of Night (1958), in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, is another example in which the filmmaker’s passion for movement, dance, and choreography is on full display.

Avant-Garde Documentarist

In 1947, Deren won the Grand Prix Internationale at the Cannes Film Festival as well as a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to research the Haitian ritual of vodun. Although her early films are usually heralded as experimental, and the later works are seen as merely ethnographic, Deren’s approach to documentary filmmaking was also quite avant-garde. The filmmaker made her objections to the traditional style of producing documentaries, claiming that it was unimaginative and lacked art. Instead, she took the same wistful approach to documentary as she had with her first films. During her visits between 1947 and 1954, Deren shot more than 18,000 feet of footage, which later produced Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti and Meringues and Folk Ballads of Haiti. These films were edited together posthumously by her third husband, composer Teiji Ito, and his new wife.

Film Theorist and Educator

Outside of the editing room, the filmmaker also regularly wrote and delivered lectures across the United States to discuss her writings on film theory and screen her films. Deren was a prolific writer, publishing various essays, including An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, and many others that would be included in collections. Through her written works, the filmmaker encouraged others to further develop their films, not simply through more equipment or personnel but through a deepening of context and meaning. As a result, she challenged conventional approaches to cinema not only through her visual but written works as well. She dissected cinema on screen and in print, examining her work and the art form as a whole.

Maya Deren’s Legacy

Long after she stopped making films, Deren would be remembered for her fearless approach to cinema, going so far as to even distribute her own films. The filmmaker was also a founding member of the Creative Film Foundation in the 1950s, an organization that sought to reward filmmakers and offer support to experimental filmmakers following in her footsteps. Deren’s approach to filmmaking would inspire Amos Vogel to found Cinema 16, a film society in New York City that supported experimental film. Together, Cinema 16 and the Creative Film Foundation would present awards to independent filmmakers between 1951 and 1961. Today, Deren is regarded as an important figure in the New American Cinema. Her influence can still be felt by filmgoers and future filmmakers alike, with notable references to her work appearing in films like Lost Highway (1997) by David Lynch alongside countless others.

Notes of a Painter (1908) is a crucial text for understanding the artistic intentions of Matisse in the latter part of the first decade of the 20th century. Rather than a new departure, however, it was a crystallization of his intentions that would lead to a more simplified aesthetic dedicated to a purity of expression, fidelity to nature, and the relation of universal humanity. This could be achieved, Matisse thought, through a pictorial harmony of form and color.

The Year That Tamed the Wild Beast? Matisse in 1908

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) produced a written account of his art in the year 1908. His Notes of a Painter provides insight into his intentions and methods to achieve them. David Carrier has gone so far as to say that Matisse’s Notes “predicted his career,” and that it is only after 1908 that the vision outlined in the text was striven for and achieved. However, this article aims to show that the fundamental aims of Matisse’s art are evident in his work prior to that date.

Rather than the text being the departure point for a revolution, it is rather an elucidation on the part of the artist of what was imperfectly achieved beforehand and a projection toward his subsequent work that has a greater unity of purpose and aesthetic. As Matisse writes: “My basic idea has not changed, but my thought has evolved, and my modes of expression have followed my thoughts.”

The circumstances that had named Matisse among the Fauvists (“wild beasts”) might not have happened. Contemporary art critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed a classical sculpture at the Salon d’Automne of 1905 in Paris as “Donatello chez les fauves” (“Donatello among the wild beasts”). The Fauves were a group of a loose aesthetic affinity who prioritized the expressive power of color and distorted form. They opposed any kind of realist imitation and the fleeting effects of Impressionism. Henri Matisse, along with André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, was seen as a leader of the Fauves. The Fauvist moment did not last long, and in the case of Matisse, Vauxcelles’s moniker was a misnomer.

Despite his non-naturalistic color and distortions, Matisse was actually seeking what he would always seek: a serene and spiritual meaning beneath—or above—the merely physical. Certainly, there was a development as Matisse evolved his manipulations of tone and concern with the human figure, but this was a continuous process of experimentation. His Notes of 1908 is an important record of a process, not an epiphany.

Notes of a Painter

In 1908, Henri Matisse published his Notes of a Painter. It was a tentative undertaking on his part in the sense that he admits feeling a certain self-consciousness about venturing into a textual account of his opinions about his art and art in general. Yet, there is certainty in the text: the convictions he outlines in it are unshakeable. Instead of the text being seen as merely a premonitory of Matisse’s work after this date, it must be seen as a verbalization of his artistic intentions. These he had been trying to realize before 1908, in his so-called Fauvist period. However, he underwent a change of stylistic direction after the Fauvist period. It is arguable, therefore, that the production of Notes of a Painter aided Matisse in clarifying to himself his pre-existing aims and method. His aims, he says, are continuous: “My basic idea has not changed.” His Fauvist art contained these aims unchanged, we may infer, but in embryonic form.

1908, therefore, is less a definitive break with Matisse’s prior art and more a distillation of its perceived best elements, with the elimination of its excess—at least in intention. The text, a manifesto for a more simplified style, is informed by a philosophical adherence to universal humanism. It speaks of the active imitation of nature, and by “active” he means the filtering of the natural world through the active force of the individual personality. This provokes in Matisse what he calls “sensation.” By this “sensation,” he seems to mean both an “awe for life” and nature, and the visual and emotional impact of the compositional arrangement together with the harmony of colors.

Matisse’s sole goal was “expression”: “My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.” Perhaps the very writing of the text of Notes of a Painter is Matisse in the process of working out his artistic route. The solidity and durability of his “destination” in his mind contrast with the aesthetic of Impressionism, with which he associates “[c]harm, lightness, freshness — such fleeting sensations.” What he wants to achieve is permanence “by insisting upon…essential character, to risk losing charm in order to obtain greater stability.” The “fugitive sensations of a moment” he rejects in the name of a “condensation of sensations” and a “general conception” that is “more fully human.” 

Matisse also writes of the artist’s relationship to nature. He advocates, rather than “servile” copying, an interpretation of it and submission of nature to “the spirit of the picture.” The ideal result will be “a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.” These ends are to be achieved instinctively instead of scientifically. The painting will be complete when “all the parts have found their definite relationships.” 

For Matisse, the human figure is paramount and partakes in the sublime. It “best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life.” His painting obsessively explores the human figure but not only for itself—it is also a means or a vehicle for the expression of spiritual human essence, the constancy of which he seeks to mirror and inform in his art.

Before 1908, his efforts were fitful and irrational; after this date, he began to arrive at a visual language that helped him approach his dream of “an art of balance, purity, and serenity.” Yet, this was always the aim. The Notes of a Painter is not a revolution in Matisse’s thought but a moment of taking account, a crystallization of method in his mind rather than of intention.

Expressive Color

The year 1908 stands between two versions of Matisse. From the arbitrary use of non-naturalistic colors in Woman with a Hat in 1905, we can glean the imposition of the artist’s sensibility on the subject matter. Much later, at the beginning of the 1920s, came the two versions of Dance. In these later pictures, color is still not strictly realistic, but it is more certainly filtered from the observation of nature through sensibility. For example, the flesh tones and colors of the landscape and skies in the Dance image have their derivation from nature, however idiosyncratically rendered.

But we must be careful not to draw a simplified line of development for Matisse’s art of these years. The arbitrary colors of Woman with a Hat come a year later than the more holistically conceived Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which was painted in 1904. The earlier painting, Luxe, has a more “overall” effect of technique. Its colors and tones are blended and gradated with subtlety, from warm to cool—as in the intermingling of yellows and blues on the water, and of the purple, blues, pink, and reds on the land.

Luxe can be seen as a free play on the Divisionist technique advocated by the rigorous Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac, who was an early influence on Matisse. Unlike Signac, however, Matisse’s juxtaposition of colors is not scientific. It is rather driven by sensation, a concept that Matisse elaborated on in his Notes. Luxe is not evidence of Divisionism per se, only of its influence. Matisse’s dabs of color are of varying sizes and shapes, and sometimes swiped together, for example, on the tree and the figures.

If anything, Luxe can be seen as an emergence from artistic influences and as a counterpoint to the heavier, more gestural painting of Woman with a Hat a year later. Woman with a Hat displays an active creative sensibility that in terms of the likeness of Amélie, Matisse’s wife, is also receptive. But in terms of the piece’s colorism, Matisse’s sensibility refashions nature through an inner expression that dominates. The picture can be described both as naturalistic mimesis and an artistic volition at odds with imitation.

Essential Condensation

In Luxe, Calme et Volupté, the “fugitive sensations of a moment” that Matisse seeks to avoid by 1908 can be detected. The image has an all-over shimmer and the passing and varied gestural actions of the figures give an effect of diffuseness. This is paradoxical—the conception is divided between a pleasing and unifying gradation of color tones and a compositional abruptness. For instance, the background figure to the left facing out away from us, and the shrouded isolated figure of the left middle distance seems incongruous. The sole note of human engagement and compositional relation is the pair in the right foreground: the seated figure in a cap and the woman drying her hair. Matisse’s compositional diffuseness here is certainly intentional but seems to flout one of the main premises of his art: harmony.

The bodies of his figures in Luxe show jarringly different styles of drawing—from the standing woman’s classicized proportions to the figure on the left in the background with arms outstretched in the bare lines and simple contours of the “primitivism” that influenced the Fauves. Yet these bare lines do fit with another premise or goal outlined in Matisse’s Notes: that of “essential lines” uncovering essential characteristics.

The Synthesis of Nature and Sensibility

Before 1908, Matisse’s art seems to have been in flux. As noted, Luxe, Calme et Volupté did display some of the characteristics of the stated aims of the later Notes of a Painter, with its blended and gradated tones making for a harmonious effect. Matisse also writes in his Notes that he sought harmony in the sense of the relation between nature and artistic sensibility.

In Luxe there is a natural setting by the sea or a lake. Naturalistic too are the proportions of some of the figures, the morphology of the tree, and some of the color tones. The naturalistic color tones can be seen in the red and gold light reflecting from the water.

However, evidence of an “anti-naturalism,” and what can be ascribed to the artist’s sensibility, is in the exaggeration of tonal contrasts. The warmth or heat of color is heightened and also deepened through cold purple and blues in the effects of shadow. The proportions of some of the figures, for example, the left background figure with arms outstretched or the shrouded middle ground figure, are certainly non-naturalistic.

Matisse’s 1908 aim of revealing a “more fully human” essence beyond the means of naturalism is shown here. The figures are not individuated through the painting of their facial features—such features are attenuated and rudimentary. He is painting common humanity rather than a picture of individual people, a universalizing stability of mood that is in concert with his all-over application of paint in loose Divisionism and in his harmony of colors.

In Woman with a Hat of the following year, sensibility seems to dominate nature. This painterly domination through more overtly non-naturalistic colors and shapes exemplifies Matisse’s later expounded aim of the “decorative,” but not the harmonious. This is evident in the impossibly weighty and intricate forms of the hat. Yet, he achieves a likeness of Amélie linearly, if not tonally. The picture is bipartite: on the one hand, there is formal and linear mimesis, while on the other, there is a wild and riotous colorism.

Where in Woman with a Hat, nature and sensibility are juxtaposed without resolution, producing a jarring effect, the harmony of Luxe looks forward to the intentions of the Notes and beyond, to the later Dance images and Music (of 1909-10).

Dance I and II, and Music have a pared-back simplicity. They display a general flattening of tone and fewer colors. These effects match the subject matter and the themes of an original, primeval essence. The natural simplicity of the environment and the naked dancing women combine with Matisse’s sensibility and artistic volition, all of which are participants in the human impulse to express. That is plain as much in the act of dancing in the Dance pictures and the music-making in Music, as in Matisse’s harmonizing vision of them.

Figure and Spirit

Luxe and Woman with a Hat both have a trenchant physicality but in different ways. In Luxe the various styles of drawing the human figure—from the classical nude to the stripped-back and sketched outline—show Matisse’s concern with the body. Luxe’s idyllic, non-worldly scene is heavy with the variety of the human, especially the female, form. It seems that the only male, the seated figure of the left foreground—is fully clothed.

In Woman with a Hat, physicality is also in evidence but, beyond the form of Amélie being painted, physicality is more so in the manner of painting. The paint is applied in thick and rough strokes, the greens of the face intensifying the weightiness of flesh, being darker than natural flesh tones. The huge and heavy hat—both extensive and in dark hues—also contributes to a general freighted effect. In Luxe the manner of painting, with its loose and light dabs of mostly warm colors, is light and contrasts with the physicality of its figures. But in Woman with a Hat, everything is of a solemn weight, even down to Amélie’s expression.

Matisse wrote in 1908 that painting the human figure “best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life.” These two paintings of 1904 and 1905 reveal Matisse still searching for a form for the human figure that would radiate this sense of awe.

Being Outside Time

As outlined, Luxe has various human forms but the overall effect of the painting technique is a unifying factor that works to portray, as well as the idyllic scene, the bliss that the envisioning of it invokes in the sensibility.

In Woman with a Hat, the human form is largely obscured by its accoutrements. Amélie’s likeness is at least formally painted, and the graceful lines of her raised right arm are compositionally prominent. However, this 1905 picture seems to be a regression or a detour in Matisse’s quest for a universal and essential concept of the figure, especially when compared with Luxe from 1904. Also working against his stated aim of capturing the human essence, the “deep gravity which persists in every human being,” in Woman with a Hat are the very adornments he paints—from hat to fan.

A look at Matisse’s later work, after 1908, shows an evasion of the contemporary social environment. We can see that his search to portray the essence of humanity comes to entail, perhaps necessarily, the unbinding of his subject matter from any temporal locality. Indeed, in Luxe, he experiments with this ahistorical sense of being but in an inconsistent way in terms of the depiction of the human figure.

In his Notes of 1908, Matisse elucidates both his aim in this direction and his future means to achieve it: he hits on the idea of a “general conception” and the “condensation of sensations” that he craves.

So, in the subsequent works, Dance I and II, and Music, he brings these aims to fruition. These later works shear away the extraneous, the incidental, and the inessential. In the Dance pictures, he does so through the medium of a purified rhythm. This rhythm unifies the subject matter and the method of painting. Matisse is painting not so much figures dancing as motion itself embroiling the figures in dance. The elongated and linked arms especially are like ribbons taken by the fervent wind of motion. Each woman is drawn in a “primitivist” style, with rudimentary features.

Matisse has developed here a thematic of incorporation or de-individuation (also evident in a limited way in Luxe in 1904). In the Dance images, this incorporation is exercised to the point where the women are only distinguishable from each other by their momentary positions in the chain of movement. Facially and tonally, they are interchangeable. A primeval and essential humanity is portrayed in a primeval and barely adumbrated landscape.

Again, like in Luxe, the setting can be construed as idyllic in these images of 1909 and 1910—a vision of a lost, golden age, or an ahistorical relic of a fantasy of nostalgia. This time, though, there is a concentration (“condensation”) of gestural uniformity, unified action, and human essence. In Music, there is a further reduction to a perceived essence, and it establishes a pure being, with the only activity the playing and singing of the inaudible strains of a universal humanity.

Bibliography

Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-2000.

Egyptian art does not always get its due credit. It often gets overshadowed by its Greek successor. The classical Western narrative and the history of ideas tend to favor Greek cultures as the wellspring of civilization. Late twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers a brand new way to think about Egyptian art; he invents a concept of the crystal. You might remember the images with flat two-dimensional surfaces. If you stare long enough at these cartoonish figures, you might feel an overwhelming sense of permanence. They refuse to budge even in our imagination.

Deleuze’s Conceptual Apparatus

Preservation is perhaps the defining term for Egyptian painting. Over three millennia later, the eyes of a scribe or an Egyptian pharaoh still stare at us at the same exact angle. Undamaged by centuries of dust and strata between them and us. Some tend to read this stillness as a flaw, or a limitation: it is often interpreted as a failure to master perspective. It is a limitation that would be corrected, developed by the Greeks and later by Renaissance artists.

In contrast, Deleuze reads this as a triumph of the Egyptian crystalline technique, the attempt to immortalize the present. The purpose of Egyptian art is to identify and codify the essences, the invariable elements of reality and human experience. Deleuze refers to the process as molding.

I find that the easiest way into the Deleuzian ontology of painting is precisely through the notion of the mold. To mold something is to press it in from the outside, via some external source, a shape, a premade frame. The way a brickmaster forces wet clay into a wooden structure. Deleuze claims Egyptian artists were attempting to do something similar with the human body. Unlike some periods in the history of art that attempt to capture actions, processes, the dynamism of nature, like a person or animal mid-motion, Egyptians were instead trying to “press” the person or animal into an eternal form. The technique reflects their unique cosmological worldview.

Now Deleuze contrasts this with the Greek approach. In his 1981 Lectures on Painting, Deleuze draws on the work of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Buffon. Deleuze associates Greek forms of expression with the model rather than the mold.

Visual Mummification as Permanent Modulation

It is interesting how Deleuze employs a metaphor that is at once obvious, literal, and unexpected. It is quite characteristic of Deleuzian discourse to remain at the surface while manipulating it in novel and creative ways. The metaphor here is that of mummification. We are all familiar with the ancient ritual, but to take that idea and use it as a creative diagram to make sense of other aspects of Egyptian culture is a genius minimalist intervention.

Egyptian civilization treated time as a serious threat, a danger. Change implies decay and eventually, death. The purpose of art was to act as a protective measure. To rescue experience from the corroding effects of time. Flat contours, rigid postures, hieroglyphic stillness, these are tools for preserving people, things, rituals, for preserving essences.

Mold and model are but two elements of the tripartite diagram offered by Deleuze. The third element is modulation. Deleuze borrows these concepts from the French philosopher Simondon. To illustrate the structure, we can think of mold and modulation (with modeling in the middle) as two extremes that characterize different painting styles. If Egyptian art rests at one end, the side of the mold, with hieroglyphs being an example, a painter like Van Gogh would reside on the other end, the side of modulation.

Modulation refers to a process of endless reshaping that never quite settles into a determinate form. It is, in a way, a technique of endless and continuous molding. Whereas a mold is just modulation frozen in time. A mold is a shape that was modulated only once. Conceptually, this is quite sophisticated, because the definition of each of the three elements in Simondon’s formula is dependent on the definition of the other two.

Egyptian Art as An Alternative Space of Touch

Another important term introduced by Deleuze is hapticity. Deleuze borrows the term haptic from the Greek word for touch. He uses the term to describe a way of looking that behaves like touching.

The eye can allegedly move through a painting as if it were a felt surface. This contrasts sharply with the idea of the canvas operating as a window. Classical representation tends to assume this position. A painting is typically understood as a window onto another world that it only mirrors or represents.

Hapticity offers an alternative interpretation. Instead of seeing Egyptian art as a stage of development that only later culminates in the model of classical representation, it carves out a unique place for it as an expression of flattened haptic sensibility. The distinction between foreground and background is eliminated, nothing recedes, and nothing protrudes. Deleuze refers to this as a “skin-deep” operation; it represents a new kind of depth that remains on the surface.

The contours that confine various gods, queens, servants, and deities have an important sacred function. They shelter their memory, their essence; indeed, they mummify them.

This is a different signal-space, as Deleuze refers to it. A signal-space that attempts to capture the force of permanence. The contour, the border, the outline, the straight line, this simple feature is the defining element of Egyptian art. The contour that shields and protects essences, the essences of man, woman, god, animal, king from dissipation and forgetting.

Essence Beyond Imitation

So the paradox that holds me captive whenever I contemplate the Deleuzian take on Egypt is the following. To achieve the truest resemblance, Egyptian artists had to abandon resemblance in the ordinary sense.

The true resemblance of man, for instance, offers the least actual resemblance to the human figure. Monochrome skin tones, rigid profiles, impossible postures, these are not human beings as we encounter them in everyday life. Nonetheless, no one has any trouble recognizing the figures exactly for what they are. Deleuze refers to this as resemblance through non-resembling means. This idea is another central concept in his seminars.

A body in motion is a body that is dying, dissipating, giving in to the temporal flux of becoming. It ages, sickens, falls apart. These dynamic features of experience are the enemy. The enemy is the world of turbulent change that needs to be kept at bay by the contour. This is the crystal.

Crystals grow only on surfaces; hence the choice of metaphor. The collapse of the foreground and the background is best captured by the idea of the crystalline law. Hence, the boundary, the separating line, is what brings the metaphors of crystallization and mummification together. The crystalline mold mummifies aspects of reality and thereby extracts immortal essences from them, preserving memory once and for all.

What Egyptian Art Teaches Us About Modern Space

Even when writing about and discussing modern painters, Deleuze kept returning to the Egyptian signal-space. The same vocabulary of mold, model, modulation, crystal was redeployed in the analysis of, for instance, Francis Bacon’s work, Turner’s paintings, and Baroque art including Rubens. Egypt offers Deleuze the starting point for a genealogy that runs all the way to the present. In fact, there is no obvious chronology to the Deleuzian history of painting. During the lectures he often leaps from one epoch to another.

Our era is defined by the notion of modulation. We are modulatory subjects, so to speak, with creative modulatory forms of artistic expression. Speed and reinvention drive our perception and understanding of the world around us. The contrast with Egypt is obvious. Any depiction of stillness and permanence sounds like naive nostalgia or simple failure in our age.

Today, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is one of the best-known names in art, but his work went largely unacknowledged during his life. Despite facing personal adversity, he was a prolific artist, completing over 2,000 artworks in just over a decade. Today, many of these are now among the most famous paintings ever created. How well do you know Vincent van Gogh? Discover the artist with ten essential works that every art lover should know.

1. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

One of art history’s most infamous moments was when Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear. It happened in December 1888, after a heated argument with friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin in Arles, France. Suffering a psychotic episode, Van Gogh severed his left ear. Weeks later, he painted Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, one of just three self-portraits that reference his illness. Wearing a fur-lined cap, Van Gogh captured the bitter January cold and his inner turmoil. The painting also reflects his dashed dream of an artist’s studio in the south, the Yellow House, which he abandoned after Gauguin left.

Despite everything, Van Gogh continued to work. The background shows a painting in progress and a Japanese print; symbols of his commitment and inspiration. Eighteen months later, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot. Others memorialized him too: portraits by John Russell, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Lucien Pissarro, and even his doctor, Paul Gachet.

2. The Potato Eaters

Van Gogh only turned to art at the age of 27, following a string of unsuccessful jobs. Early in his career, he was influenced by Dutch genre painting and used a palette of dark tones, a stark contrast to the famously colorful style he developed later. As he embarked on his new path in life, Van Gogh spent some time living near his parents in the small Dutch village of Nuenen. The rural landscape, farmers, and peasants inspired the fledgling artist, and he made several paintings of bucolic scenes.

To prove himself, Van Gogh began to work on his early masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. He wanted to create a showpiece and chose a complex composition that demonstrated his artistic skill. The scene depicts five peasants around a table eating their daily meal of potatoes. The bony hands and rough faces show the harsh reality of country life. The figures are painted in earthy colors, not unlike those of a freshly picked potato. It was the painting’s message and symbolic use of color that was important to Van Gogh, and he was pleased with the piece. However, Van Gogh’s brother and an artist friend were not impressed, criticizing the dark colors and mistakes in the figures.

3. Sunflowers

Sunflowers are synonymous with Van Gogh. His famous yellow flowers are some of the most iconic artworks of his career. He painted seven versions of Sunflowers, five of which are on display in public collections around the world. The first four of the series were created in August of 1888, just before Gauguin arrived at the Yellow House. Van Gogh was eager to please his guest, and so, knowing that Gauguin liked his earlier sunflower still lifes, he began to create his famous series. He hung two of the paintings in the guest bedroom, ready for Gauguin’s arrival.

He may have also chosen the flower for its symbolic nature. The sunflower has been associated with love for centuries, and for Van Gogh, this may have extended to friendship or artistic partnership. In the version of Sunflowers held by the National Gallery in London, there are 15 flowers at different stages of their life cycle. This stylistic choice reflects the vanitas tradition of using objects as reminders of mortality and the worthlessness of worldly goods, a popular device seen in 17th-century Dutch paintings.

4. Café Terrace at Night

Although Café Terrace at Night is a nocturnal painting, it is strikingly colorful. The scene shows the Café Terrace at The Place du Forum in Arles on a starlit night. The warm yellows and oranges of the gaslit street contrast with the deep blue of the heavens. Van Gogh created the painting in situ on the evening of September 16, 1888. He had an interest in astronomy and depicted the constellations exactly as they appeared in the sky that night.

It is thought that Van Gogh was inspired by Avenue de Clichy (Street—Five O’clock in the Evening), a painting by his friend Louis Anquetin (1861–1932). Anquetin’s work is also an evening street scene with a similar color palette of contrasting warm yellows and cool blues. Van Gogh certainly appreciated the work and included it in his Peintres du Petit Boulevard exhibition in 1887.

5. Starry Night Over the Rhône

Since his arrival in Arles, Van Gogh had been eager to create paintings with what he described as “night effects.” He wrote to both his brother, Theo, and his friend, Émile Bernard (1868–1941), about his desire to create a starry sky. Much of what we know about van Gogh comes from his correspondence with his brother Theo, who was an art dealer and well-connected in contemporary art circles.

Café Terrace at Night was his first attempt at night painting, which includes a patch of starlit sky. With Starry Night Over the Rhône, Van Gogh made the sky the centerpiece, creating a dazzling scene of the river Rhône under a sky ablaze with stars. He used an array of blues, including Prussian blue, ultramarine, and cobalt, to reproduce the colors as he saw them in the darkness. The gaslights and warm reflection of the lamps and stars in the water contrast with the deep blue of the night sky. This piece evokes a sense of serenity, enhanced by the lovers pictured in the bottom right corner of the canvas.

6. The Bedroom

In 1888, Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House, marking the first time that he had a home of his own. He decorated the house himself, painting several canvases to fill the walls. In October of that year, he created the first of three paintings of his bedroom. The Bedroom shows his simply furnished but homely bedroom, complete with his own artwork hung on the walls. Van Gogh aimed to express repose or relaxation with his use of color.

Some of the pigment has faded over time, and the walls and door, which were once a vivid purple, now appear as a pale blue. The flattened perspective and lack of shadows are deliberate choices, made to resemble a Japanese print. The artist was pleased with the result, commenting to his brother in a letter, “When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was the bedroom.”

7. Irises

Irises is one of several paintings depicting the purple flower. This particular piece was painted during the artist’s first week at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, to which he had voluntarily admitted himself seeking refuge from his illness. During his time at the asylum, the last year of his life, he executed almost 130 paintings.

Each flower is unique, attesting to the artist’s study and observation. The use of yellow, complementing the flowers’ purple, adds vibrancy and joy to the canvas. Van Gogh intended Irises to be a study and painted it from nature in the gardens of the asylum. It was his art dealer brother, Theo, who recognized the painting’s quality, calling it “a beautiful study full of air and life.” Theo submitted the work to the Salon des Indépendants in September 1889.

8. Wheatfield with Cypresses

Cypress trees became a recurring motif in Van Gogh’s work from 1888. In April of that year, he commented to his brother in a letter that he needed “a starry night with Cypresses or — perhaps above a field of ripe wheat.” He went on to realize both of these ambitions in his works Starry Night and Wheatfield with Cypresses. In the summer of 1889, Van Gogh created three versions of Wheatfield with Cypresses: two on the same scale and one smaller piece, which he gifted to his mother and sister.

He painted outdoors and wrote of working in the strong, cold wind of the South of France. This wind is evident in Van Gogh’s distinctive brushstrokes and swirls, animating the trees, fields of wheat, and clouds. Wheatfield with Cypresses is noted for its rich impasto, and the artist cited Adolphe Monticelli (1824–1886) as an influence in using this technique. With this work, he was also responding to paintings by Gauguin and Bernard. Their works were increasingly moving away from Impressionism and towards abstraction.

9. Almond Blossom

Van Gogh had a deep appreciation for Japanese printmaking, amassing a collection of over 600 works. It was a significant source of inspiration for him, and the influence is clearly evident in Almond Blossom. Blossoming trees were one of his favorite subjects, and this was a particularly personal painting. He created it as a gift for his brother, Theo, and his wife to celebrate the birth of their son. They named Vincent Willem after his uncle.

Almond trees are among the first to flower in the spring. They symbolize new life, making them a fitting subject to celebrate the occasion. The Van Gogh family treasured the painting, which hung in their home for many years. Later, it became part of the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was established by Vincent Willem.

10. Starry Night

Starry Night is arguably Van Gogh’s most famous work. The painting was inspired by the view from the artist’s window at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. It shows the night sky dramatically lit by the moon and bright stars, illuminating a small village at the foot of the hills and a cypress tree rising in the foreground. Van Gogh spoke of his inspiration for the painting in a letter to his brother. He wrote, “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.”

Rather than a direct representation of the view, the painting is a mixture of observation and imagination. Van Gogh incorporated memories and emotions. The church at the center of the composition resembles those found in the artist’s native Netherlands. The swirling brushstrokes that appear to roll across the canvas add a sense of turbulence to the scene. These contrast with the more tranquil feel of his earlier Starry Night Over the Rhône. Starry Night is a masterpiece of Post-Impressionism, a movement in which Van Gogh was a pioneer. His expressive brushstrokes and coloration imbue the painting with a profound sense of personal emotion, a defining feature of the movement.

Rosa Bonheur was a French animal painter who defied the artistic and gendered conventions of her time. Although her work was hardly experimental, her personality and commitment made her unique and accomplished. She was the wealthiest artist of her time but was almost forgotten a century later. Today, a number of art experts and historians aim to reevaluate the art of Rosa Bonheur and bring her back to fame.

1. Rosa Bonheur Had a Remarkable Family

The phenomenal success of Rosa Bonheur would have been impossible in her time without the string of favorable, albeit sometimes traumatic, circumstances of her family life and origins. Her father was a landscape painter who was hardly present during the earliest years of her life, as he was too engaged in his political and professional pursuits. Born in 1822, Rosa Bonheur was the oldest of four siblings and gave enough trouble to her mother, who was a quiet and collected piano teacher. Rosa had little inclinations towards education, preferring to play outside and draw. To teach her reading and writing, Rosa’s mother had to find a suitable compromise: she offered her daughter the opportunity to draw pictures of animals corresponding to each letter she learned. Attempts at formal education proved rather futile after Bonheur was expelled from several schools for her disruptive behavior and boyish attitude.

Rosa lost her mother to a cholera epidemic at the age of just ten. Consequently, her father stepped back into the picture. He was the follower of Saint-Simonianist philosophy, a socialist doctrine that, apart from specific views on industrialism and workers’ rights, advocated for equal education and equal rights for women. Recognizing his daughter’s talent, Rosa’s father arranged for her to attend drawing classes in an all-boys art school, and he also started to teach her himself. By the age of 13, Rosa already helped her father in his artistic studio. He arranged a study course at the Louvre, where she trained by copying paintings and sculptures made by famous masters. Seeing her excitement about animal painting, the father even leased an entire apartment only to keep a small menagerie of animals like rabbits and canaries.

2. She Received an Official Permit to Wear Pants in Public

Above all, Rosa Bonheur was interested in painting animals—all kinds of animals, not limited to chickens and kittens, which were easily available to her in domestic settings. She wanted to study cows, oxen, and horses closely and in detail, but she could hardly do it in her current social status. Although her family lived near farms, working in the mud in crinolines and petticoats would be unendurable. The most exciting places for her were horse markets, which openly discouraged the presence of women. The mere sight of an unaccompanied lady could cause scandal and harassment, making such visits unsafe for Bonheur. To ensure her safety and follow her professional interests, she resorted to seeking help from the state.

In 1800, the Paris prefecture officially adopted a decree prohibiting women from wearing men’s attire. This measure was implemented as a reaction to the growing women’s rights movements and several theoretical writings condemning lesbianism. Exceptions from the no-pants rule could be made either due to medical conditions or a professional necessity. The permit lasted for a period of three to six months and needed to be reviewed and reissued. Still, even the presence of a permit did not allow women to attend concerts and many other public social events. Bonheur received her permit as an artist working in horse fairs and slaughterhouses to avoid unwanted attention and hygienic troubles. Absurdly, the decree promising fines and jail time for women who refused to abide was overturned only in 2013, although, obviously, it was not enforced for decades.

3. Her Most Famous Work Catapulted Her to Fame

Quite soon, Bonheur started to attract attention not only for her original way of dressing but for her art as well. At the age of only 19, she exhibited two of her small works at the Paris Salon. For many artists, such an honor was the pinnacle of their career, but for Rosa Bonheur, this was only the beginning. Her great rise to fame happened in 1855 when she presented the monumental painting The Horse Fair. For two years, she attended the Paris horse market several times a week, studying and sketching the movement of horses and humans, their characters, and temperaments.

Initially, she was discouraged from painting such a subject, deemed too ambitious and intense for a woman painter. Still, upon the work’s reveal, the critics highlighted the masculine qualities of the work and the dramatism similar to the works by Theodore Gericault.

The painting immediately made Bonheur an international celebrity. Initially, Bonheur approached the French state, offering to officially commission the work, but the officials were not interested. After the artist presented her finished work, the officials’ opinions changed, but Bonheur refused to accept their apologies and payment. Instead, she went on a European tour with a collection of her works, exhibiting in Belgium and Britain. The work made Bonheur not only incredibly famous but also extraordinarily wealthy since the exhibits were followed by a string of commissions and studio visits.

4. She Kept a Menagerie of Exotic Animals

What started from a small menagerie of birds in Bonheur’s teenage years grew into a full-blown private zoo. Just four years after The Horse Fair made her famous, the artist became too tired from the constant social buzz and expectations. So, Bonheur bought a chateau outside Paris, where she would spend the following forty years of her life completely immersed in her work. There, she arranged a menagerie of animals, some of them too exotic for the French land. She had oxen and mouflons, deers and gazelles, and even a couple of lions, with the lioness walking freely on the property.

Bonheur’s partner, Nathalie Micas, helped with the animals’ upkeep. The two women met as teenagers and lived almost half a century together. Micas also became a painter, although a less successful one. Apart from her own work, she helped Bonheur rework and prepare her paintings for printed reproduction. Many rumors have surrounded the couple’s relationship, yet most contemporaries noted the tender, matrimonial attitude of women towards each other and a gendered separation of domestic duties, with Bonheur being the provider and Micas the housekeeper.

5. Dolls Were Made After Her Image

Bonheur’s immediate rise to fame had an unusual and unexpected side effect. She was not only a famous painter but a celebrity who became so popular she even had her own merchandise. In the 1870s, German porcelain manufacturers produced a Rosa Bonheur doll—a figure of the artist with her signature haircut wearing gentleman’s clothing and carrying a walking stick. Dolls have actually played an important role in the development of Bonheur’s creative aspirations. In her diaries, she remembered that, as a child in her father’s studio, she used to watch him as he painted portraits of live models. Carefully observing the scene, she sat next to his easel and arranged her dolls in the same position as the people in front of her.

The Rosa Bonheur doll was immensely popular even outside Germany. For instance, the American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, 34 years younger than Bonheur, owned one of these dolls in her childhood, gradually growing her fascination with the daring artist. As a teenager, he studied and copied Bonheur’s works and finally met her when both artists were 39 and 73 years old, respectively. Klumpke offered to paint Bonheur’s portrait, and that meeting transformed into a relationship that ended with Bonheur’s death just four years later. Klumpke dedicated the following forty years of her life to documenting the life of Bonheur, preserving her archives and artworks.

6. Gender Trouble: Rosa Bonheur’s Ambiguous Gender Presentation

Contrary to widespread belief, the understanding of gender and the general concept of it are not fixed and vary depending on time, place, and social conditions. Thus, a conversation about Rosa Bonheur’s gender identity sometimes gets complex as we try to apply 21st-century notions to the life and mindset of a 19th-century person. Some present-day historians suggest that Bonheur could be categorized as a transgender man in contemporary terms. However, her personal account repeatedly confirms that, despite the preference for male attire, traditionally male-prescribed activities, and the strict gender-coded division of household labor at her and Micas’ household, the artist boldly identified as a woman. Moreover, she insisted that her accomplishments were proof of women’s capability to create great art.

However, Bonheur’s gender identity and sexuality remain subjects of debate. Even though plenty of information suggests a romantic relationship between Bonheur and both her companions, the current owner of Rosa Bonheur’s chateau, Katherine Brault, prefers to avoid this question. For an unclear reason, she refers to the presence of both women in Bonheur’s life as acts of extraordinary sisterhood.

Angelica Kauffman was a legendary Neoclassical painter who made an astonishingly successful career at a time when women artists were barely allowed to do so. The daughter of a poor Swiss painter, she became one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Art in Great Britain and one of the most commercially successful artists of her time. She balanced her creative spirit with wise self-promotion, leaving a great legacy behind. Read on to learn seven facts about Angelica Kauffman and her work.

1. Angelica Kauffman Was a Child Prodigy

Angelica Kauffman, the legend of 18th-century painting, was born in Switzerland in 1741. Although her family was relatively poor, the environment was still perfect for her developing creative spirit. Her father was a provincial painter who recognized his daughter’s talent already in her early childhood. He took the girl to his studio, teaching her how to draw and paint. By the age of thirteen, Angelica Kauffman already created astonishing painted works, the level of which corresponded more closely with the works of mature artists. At the same time, she demonstrated great interest in music and was torn between the two possible careers. According to a legend, she consulted a local priest who warned her that a career as a performer could harm the reputation and morals of the young Catholic lady.

Kauffman’s father was eager to develop his daughter’s talent and took her to Italy to observe and copy the works of the Old Masters. She worked in Rome, Naples, Florence, and Bologna, attracting significant attention everywhere since women, let alone young girls, rarely had opportunities to learn in such a manner. In Italy, she started to earn her first painting commissions while still a teenager.

2. She Painted Innovative Self-Portraits

In the mid-1760s, the fame of the young and gifted woman artist traveled from the continent to Great Britain. Invited by the British ambassador to Venice, Kauffman soon moved there and established a studio. She quickly gained prominence and made important friends. One of her closest confidantes was the famous portrait painter Joshua Reynolds. Rumors spread about their possible romantic affair, but historians have no reasons to suspect anything other than a close friendship.

From the start of her career, she created a lot of self-portraits that depicted the development of her artistic skill and self-perception as an artist. She often painted herself with a portfolio and a brush or crayon in her hands. Such pose was often used to depict amateur women painters, but Kauffman had no intention to diminish her importance as an artist. Instead, she refused to distance herself from those women who were less lucky and did not manage to secure a full-time career due to restrictions and responsibilities. In her allegorical works, she often painted female characters as writers or artists at a time when such occupations were rarely available to them.

3. She Worked With Various Forms and Genres

Unlike many other artists who specialized in one particular painting genre, Angelica Kauffman was a flexible painter, confident in her abilities. Although she was best known as a portraitist, she worked with allegories and mythological scenes. However, the boldest of her accomplishments was history painting—the most prestigious genre, reserved exclusively for men. Kauffman’s training in Antique and Classical art provided her with the perfect background to paint battle scenes and events of the past.

From a commercial point of view, she was also good at promoting her work. Kauffman worked closely with several printmakers and art dealers, creating wall decor, textile designs, and ceramics. She did not limit herself to her personal artistic ambition; she carefully studied the market and was ready to produce works corresponding to popular demand. Kauffman’s papers and receipts were kept in order first by her father, who worked as her manager, and then by her second husband, an older decorative painter who was eager to promote Kauffman’s career.

4. She Got Married Twice

Kauffman’s personal life became the subject of many myths and rumors. Some art historians believe that the nature of her relationships and marriages was the reason for her status as a prominent artist. Many other aspiring women artists became trapped in the duties of household and motherhood.

Angelica Kauffman got married for the first time in 1767 when she was 26 and recently moved to London. The marriage was a disaster that quickly turned into a scandal: her husband, Swedish Count Frederick de Horn, was not a count but an imposter, married to another woman in Germany. His main motivation for marrying Kauffman was to secure legal reasons to remain in Britain.

Months after the marriage, the fake Count revealed his scheme to his new wife. Eager to get rid of the scammer, Kauffman’s father paid him to leave his daughter as soon as possible, and the marriage was soon annulled. The scandal of the illegal marriage allowed Kauffman to remain single for the following decade, focused on her career. Rumors of her affairs still lingered: some said she had a short-term relationship with the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, and others speculated that her longtime friend Reynolds proposed to her but was rejected. In 1781, she married an Italian painter called Antonio Zucchi, who helped her manage her career.

5. She Was a Founder of the Royal Academy of Arts

One of the most significant accomplishments of Angelica Kauffman was her role in establishing the Royal Academy of Arts. As an artist in high demand, Kauffman kept close ties with the Royal family—this connection for sure helped her maintain her social status after her messy and scandalous divorce. In 1768, she approached King George III with the idea of establishing an institution that would oversee artistic training and production to develop British art. In December of the same year, the King officially established the Royal Academy of Arts, with Kauffman and still-life painter Mary Moser being the only two women out of 34 founding members.

Joshua Reynolds was appointed the Academy’s president. Other founding members included Thomas Gainsborough (who would soon refuse to exhibit there after a scandal), Nathaniel Hone, Thomas Sandby, and others. Generally, the Academy was supportive and respectful towards Kauffman and Moser, yet glimpses of inequality and disrespect still occasionally sparked. The 1772 painting by Johan Zoffany featured 32 Academy founders in one room, surrounded by Antique sculptures and nude models. The two remaining founders, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, were present only in the form of portraits hung on the wall, acknowledged but not allowed to be present.

6. Her Rome Studio Became a Tourist Landmark

Kauffman’s popularity was astonishing not only for a woman painter but for any artist of her time. The only artist who was paid more than Kauffman was Joshua Reynolds, who also worked with portraits of the British elite. In the 1780s, she moved to Rome, hoping to attract more attention to her history paintings rather than portraiture.

During the 18th century, upper-class young men often went on the so-called Grand Tour to finish their education. The Grand Tour was a long trip through Europe that proved that the young man was sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to enter society. The trip itinerary varied slightly depending on the person, their financial means, and interests, but there was always the focus on Italy with its Roman ruins and Old Master paintings.

Kauffman’s studio in Rome became so famous and popular that it became one of the top Grand Tour destinations in the city. She still communicated with the Academy from Italy, sending works for their exhibitions. Known as an educated, smart, and charming woman, she led a busy social and cultural life, attending meetings at poets’ and artists’ societies. There, she befriended Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the famous architect Antonio Canova.

7. The Dark Side of Angelica Kauffman’s Fame

The artist passed away in 1807, and Canova directed her funeral and designed her tombstone. In the years following her death, Angelica Kauffman’s staggering popularity eventually became her downfall. After several years of universal appraisal of everything related to her, the mass obsession reached its peak and plummeted. The art market became oversaturated with cheap reproductions that did no justice to the original paintings.

After Kauffman became unable to fend for herself, her artistic accomplishments gradually diminished. Critics complained about the “feminine sentimentality” of her works and the lack of “masculine” assertiveness and a strong hand. While hardly anyone dared to question Kauffman’s abilities during her lifetime, she was dismissed as too gentle and amateur after her death. Her work was rediscovered in the 20th century, and Kauffman was finally appreciated as an innovative and talented artist once again.

Although Abstract Expressionism, with its capacious, splattered, and stained canvases and its heroic, larger-than-life artists wielding their brushes like their lives depended on it, was still the most famous art movement of the 1950s, and painting was certainly the most esteemed medium, a few artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns challenged its sway over the art world, offering subversive and oftentimes amusing works that refused to identify themselves as painting or sculpture. Neo-Dada artists also collaborated with dancers and composers, finding inspiration in the dialogue between the disciplines.

What Is Neo-Dada? A Primer

To understand what “neo-dada” means, it’s necessary to first understand “Dada.” Dada art was a style that originated in Europe during and just after the WWI years, flourishing in cities such as Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. (Although in German “da da” is translated to “there, there” and in French it means “hobbyhorse,” the term “dada” as used here is nonsense; it was simply intended to be as anti-art a name as possible.)

Hugo Ball, its founder, stated, “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.” Dada was flamboyant, irreverent, nonsensical, and piquant, offering critiques of its bellicose and soulless society through performance, sculpture, poetry, and text.

Neo-Dada, then, was the label given to the 1950s American artists who also eschewed traditional boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture and who refused to jettison real life from their works like the Abstract Expressionists endeavored to do. Rauschenberg claimed that he worked in the “gap between art and life,” and Johns, for example, included real beer cans and images of maps and flags, while Cy Twombly evoked the scrawls of graffiti in his pieces.

Neo-Dada artists found inspiration in the quotidian and the commonplace, the base and the banal. They were experimental, and their work was often challenging to the lay viewer, who struggled with symphonies of silence and paintings of pure white. Nevertheless, their works permeated the consciousness of the art world and facilitated important conversations about art’s telos.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

Rauschenberg is perhaps the most famous of the Neo-Dada artists. A prolific, dexterous, and endlessly inventive creator, his “combines” challenged the traditional separation of mediums. Critic Brian O’Doherty wrote of the combines in 1963, “For many years Mr. Rauschenberg has been pointed steadily towards an annihilation of conventions in a new freedom. His main characteristic is a conquest of common, everyday reality from a bridgehead of abstract expressionism. He is trying to materialize an ambiguous limbo between high art and low life.”

In these works, such as Monogram (1954-1959), he combined found objects in the mode of the “readymade”—Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s term for the found object that became a work of art when activated by the artist and the exhibition space—painted surfaces, and collage. In Canyon (1959), he combined a taxidermied eagle his friend found in the trash, paintings, a photo, and other printed matter. In Bed (1955), he took an actual bed with a wooden frame, sheets, and a pillow, scribbled and splattered paint on it, and then hung it from the wall like a traditional painting.

Rauschenberg refused to be confined by any label or fall prey to the assumption advocated by the Abstract Expressionists that an artist must be cerebral, stoic, and removed from the vicissitudes of life. Rather, Rauschenberg said, “I always wanted my work—whatever happened in the studio—to look more like what was going on outside the window.” This meant that he was also engaged in other avant-garde scenes, such as music and dance.

Scholar Brandon Joseph wrote, “Throughout his career, Rauschenberg was most inventive when in intense, dialogic, and collaborative contexts, from Black Mountain to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (for which he provided sets, lighting, and costume design) to the Judson Dance Theater (which he lit and performed with) and beyond.” Joseph claimed that “none of Rauschenberg’s contemporaries…would maintain the artist’s multiplicitous and inherently deconstructive interest in combining mediums (and media) into amalgams that would exist simultaneously within all of the media they straddled—and at the same time none.”

Jasper Johns (1930-)

If there is a figure who came close to Rauschenberg’s inventiveness, it was his friend, lover, and collaborator Jasper Johns. It’s hard to even sum up his oeuvre, and anyone hard-pressed to name his most famous piece would have to choose between the flags, the maps, the numbers, the cross-hatch paintings, the beer cans, the plaster heads, and so on. Johns was an erudite, serious, and accomplished artist, but he chose to incorporate quotidian objects and imagery, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it.

Johns had started off as a painter but struggled with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. He destroyed all his previous work and moved into recognizable objects like the flag and the alphabet. He preferred to use primary colors and while he did use paint, he mixed it with encaustic to create a quick-drying material that had almost sculptural qualities.

The Broad Museum says of Johns’ early encaustic paintings that “Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were ‘co-extensive’ with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work.”

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022)

Claes Oldenburg made the case, as emphatically as Warhol with his soup cans, that food could be art. A hamburger, a piece of pie, french fries and ketchup—Oldenburg took American comfort food and made it into rather uncomfortable art. The pieces were grotesquely large, made of either plaster or vinyl. The vinyl pieces, or the “soft sculptures,” flopped, sagged, and sighed, while the plaster pieces maintained a brittle rigidity.

Oldenburg opened The Store in 1961, recreating the look and feel of neighborhood shops but with a spin. He had numerous small art pieces displayed like normal wares, but they were made of plaster-dipped muslin over wire and covered with garishly bright paint and had something uncanny about them. Like Rauschenberg and Johns, as well as the Pop artists, Oldenburg was interested in the banal, in the disposable, in the detritus of late-capitalist society.

In a 1961 artist’s statement, Oldenburg elucidated his feelings about art: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, / that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. / I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting / point of zero. / I am for an art that embroils itself with the / everyday crap and still comes out on top. / I am for an art that imitates the human, that is / comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is / necessary.”

Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

Cy Twombly’s scrawls and scratches represented a new type of gesture in visual art. Gagosian Gallery explains that “he produced works that [were] simultaneously personal and mythological, allowing narrative, language, and inner visions to erupt from his intimate, abstract notations,” doing so through painting’s traditional tenets, such as using canvas and hanging works from the wall, but ultimately deviating from many of the medium’s other characteristics.

He made marks and then erased them, referenced calligraphy and graffiti, left gaps and fragmented lines, traversed centuries, and conflated civilizations. He brought in sex, dirt, and violence, dialoguing between the ancient and the contemporary.

In 1962’s Leda and the Swan, he took the ancient myth of Jupiter turning into a swan and raping Leda and abstracted it into a cacophony of line and splotch and smear. The violent assault of Leda comes across through the violent assault on the canvas by crayon, pencil, and paint. The colors suggest semen, blood, feathers, and feces; the few discernible images of a window, heart, and phallus suggest the outlines of the story, but it is the feeling produced by the piece that gives it its power. Academy (1955) is sparser, using oil-based house paint (which Twombly smeared with his fingers), pencil, colored pencil, and pastel on canvas to create what looks simply like gray pencil scrawlings on canvas.

Critic Ann Temkin remarked that for Twombly, “the canvas was a field for mark-making that shouted and whispered, surged and slowed, swirled and skittered. The approach harked back to the automatism of the Surrealists…but now it had traded biomorphic elegance for a seemingly untutored rawness.” Temkin concluded that “Academy alludes to a tradition, a school, a set of accepted practices. Yet it is attached to a painting that writes itself out of art school and finds instead a territory unoccupied by official precepts or proscriptions,” and indeed, Academy is certainly something that its namesake would not have (initially) accepted.

John Cage (1912-1992)

John Cage was a composer who studied with modernist, atonalist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Like all composers, he sought to communicate through music, but he abandoned hierarchy and order in his pieces, not to mention the heroism and ego that came with being a composer. He valued the senses, chance, and spontaneity, and was also inspired by Duchamp’s readymade, looking for ways to interpret that pulled from real life in music. Cage said of Duchamp’s famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) that the thing he liked so much is that “I can focus my attention on wherever I wish. It helps me blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence.”

And it was silence for which Cage became famous (or infamous). In his piece 4’33, a piano player sits down on the bench before the instrument but does not touch the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In that time span, what seems to be silence is instead filled with sounds—people coughing, shuffling their feet, whispering to their companions, moving their chairs, tapping their heels. The first time this was staged, the audience’s consternation was palpable, but Cage didn’t care; he was asking his audience what music really meant—what the limits of silence and sound really were.

The composer and scholar Kyle Gan suggested that the piece “begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and More

The Judson Dance Theater was a collective of dancers, choreographers, and visual artists headquartered at the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s West Village. The Church was a well-known performance space where Judson staged numerous works that challenged prevailing notions of dance. The main figures, including Yvonne Rainer (1934-), Trisha Brown (1936-2017), Lucinda Childs (1940-), and Simone Forti (1935-), wanted to democratize dance by emphasizing “task movement”—the commonplace, anti-expressionistic gesture.

The New York Times said of the movement in 1982, “following their own creative hunches, the Judson dancers experimented with structures ranging from the most rigid to the most improvisatory and incorporated many kinds of movements into compositions. To simplify what resulted, it could be said that these choreographers tended to emphasize the physical reality of the here and now and to maintain that any kind of movement can serve as a dance movement.”

We Shall Run, a 1963 piece, consisted of dancers simply running across the stage. They wore ordinary clothing and did simple, repeated actions. In Trio A, Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 masterpiece, there was a solo performer with no music—another thing Judson wanted to do was separate dance from music, the former being usually subordinated to the latter—who performed everyday movements. It was an exploration of action, not storytelling, and avoided any dramatic gestures like leaps or pirouettes. Though it was a difficult piece for a dancer to perform, it looked deceptively simple.

Rainer’s 1965 “No Manifesto,” a text she penned to articulate the new type of dance she promulgated, can describe much of neo-dada art as a whole:

“No to spectacle. / No to virtuosity. / No to transformations / and magic and / make-believe. / No to the glamour / and transcendence / of the star mage. / No to the heroic. / No to the anti-heroic. / No to trash imagery. / No to involvement of / performer or spectator, / No to style. / No to camp. / No to seduction of / spectator by the wiles / of the performer. / No to eccentricity. / No to moving or being / moved.”

While most people know the name Pablo Picasso, how many of his artworks can you name? Did you know that across his 70-year career, he produced more than 50,000 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and more? The Spanish master manipulated mediums, forms, and genres, never ceasing to experiment and never settling on one style for too long. Consequently, he has left behind an eclectic portfolio from the melancholic depths of his Blue Period to the radical geometric fragments of Cubism and the agonizing protest of his political murals. Start your exploration of Picasso with 12 of his most iconic masterpieces that every art lover should know.

1. Self-Portrait, 1900

Pablo Picasso began his artistic training quite conventionally, with the Old Masters and Roman Antiquity as the key source materials. However, by his early 20s, he had already begun experimenting with modernist techniques. Picasso created this self-portrait when he was only 18 years old, a year before he moved from Barcelona to Paris. He already demonstrated immense technique and command of his medium, working in a Post-Impressionist style that is still quite realistic but already departing into experimentation. Over the years, Picasso created countless self-portraits that would evolve with him and his artistic styles.

2. The Life, 1903

The Life was one of the most important paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period that came after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Casagemas suffered from depression and shot himself in a Parisian cafe in front of his friends. Traumatized by his death, Picasso started painting in blue and green tones, usually on subjects of loss, poverty, and despair. The Life features a portrait of Casagemas, almost nude, embraced by the woman who rejected him not long before his death. Curiously, an X-ray of the painting showed that originally the work was a self-portrait, later repainted to resemble Casagemas.

3. Acrobat on a Ball, 1905

In 1904, Picasso fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a French artist and model who became his first long-term partner and major muse, easing the deep depression of his Blue Period. He gradually shifted tones and moved towards pinks and oranges. This stage of his life is usually called the Rose Period. He often painted groups of traveling performers and acrobats with whom he felt affinity. At the time, he lived in an artists’ commune called Bateau-Lavoir, sharing space with artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Bateau-Lavoir was a former factory building, almost ruined and squatted by artists, poets, and failed actors.

4. Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-06

One of the most famous portraits of Picasso’s pre-Cubist era was of Gertrude Stein. Stein was a prominent art collector and writer whose influence, in many ways, defined the culture of her era. Picasso’s work on the portrait was far from easy, with more than 90 painstaking sittings producing almost no result. The artist was dissatisfied with his work on the face of his model and even thought of abandoning the work altogether. At some point, he erased part of the image and left his studio for several weeks. The break forced Picasso to rethink his relationship with the painted image. Instead of relying on the physical accuracy of the face and body, he decided to focus on the impression Stein created as a personality: confident, substantial, and observant.

5. Self-Portrait, 1907

Another self-portrait, this time at the age of 25, reflected Picasso’s obsession with African and Romanesque art. At the time, he was looking for alternatives to traditional Western visual language and found them in African sculpture. In May 1907, he visited the dusty, poorly lit Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. He later described seeing traditional African ceremonial masks and sculptures for the first time as a spiritual awakening. His images were already being simplified to straight lines and geometric forms, but they did not exactly reach the mathematical complexity of Cubism.

6. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was one of Picasso’s most radical works. It shook the art world and launched an aesthetic revolution that would lead to the birth of Cubism. In this work, Picasso’s obsession with African art reached its peak. Picasso painted a group of sex workers; at the time, these women often earned extra by posing for artists. According to some art historians, the shocking and threatening faces and curves of their bodies were dictated by Picasso’s experience of venereal disease caught in a Parisian brothel. Suffering from symptoms, the artist channeled his suffering into the fear of women he felt were responsible for his state.

7. Ma Jolie, 1912

After Les Demoiselles, Picasso focused on the invention of Cubism. Cubism was a highly intellectual form of art that required dissecting and analyzing objective reality, turning it into a collection of planes, forms, and angles. To focus on the analytical aspect, Cubists like Picasso and Georges Braque simplified the color palette to grays and browns. Ma Jolie was one such bold experiment, representing Picasso’s then-partner, Eva Gouel, playing the guitar.

8. Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 1917-18

After World War I, many Western artists took a step back from their radical experiments and returned to more traditional art forms. Picasso was one of them, temporarily moving to the Neoclassical style. One of the most famous works of that period was the portrait of Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian dancer who came to France with Sergei Diaghilev’s dancing company Ballets Russes. Picasso painted it to celebrate their engagement. Even though he painted Olga in a conventional style, he still added his signature experimental element by leaving most of the canvas blank. The marriage lasted for 17 years but was rarely a happy one due to Picasso’s infidelity.

9. Guernica, 1937

Guernica is perhaps the most famous anti-war painting ever painted. In 1937, German forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica at the request of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco. Spain at the time was going through a bloody civil war, and the left-wing Republican government tried to gather support in Europe. Picasso painted the shocking image of the city in chaos for the Paris World Fair as an attempt to raise awareness about the conflict.

10. The Weeping Woman, 1937

The Weeping Woman was one of the most famous paintings by Picasso and one of the ugliest illustrations of his behavior towards women. Starting a relationship with Dora Maar, he did not care enough to break up with his previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Amused, Picasso openly pitted both women against each other and even tried to force them to physically fight each other. Dora Maar’s distressed image became the basis for The Weeping Woman. Picasso turned a talented and sharp-witted woman into a hysterical mess during an ugly breakdown. This was not the type of gesture one would expect from a caring partner.

11. Bull’s Head, 1942

Although the work of Pablo Picasso is most frequently discussed in relation to his painting, he was a multi-faceted and curious artist who enjoyed experimenting with mediums. He worked with costume design, architecture, ceramics, and, of course, sculpture. One of his most famous creations was a Dada-like assemblage, Bull’s Head, made out of a seat and handlebars of a broken bicycle. Famous Parisian photographer Brassai, who was a close friend of Picasso and had recorded conversations with the two in the painter’s studio, once asked him about the work. Picasso told him that the idea of combining these objects came to him in a flash, without conscious thinking.

12. Ecce Homo, 1971

One of Pablo Picasso’s last works was a strange image based on an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn. The original image illustrated the Biblical scene of Jesus being presented in front of the crowd just before his execution. Picasso was not religious, but he revered Rembrandt, and thus, he reimagined the scene into a secular image of a theatrical play and its audience. The chaotic crowd featured familiar faces: fellow artists, ex-partners, and other significant figures in Picasso’s life. For the artist who died less than two years later at the age of 91, this work was, in a way, the final bow at the end of his career.