“The following year, the heroes of the day were children. David was asked to paint Joseph Bara, the drummer who chose to die rather than shout ‘Vive le roi!’, and the young Provençal Agricol Viala. Of these two projects, one unfinished...
“Truth or consequence and believe-it-or-not notions umbrella Colescott’s work. Whether replacing Old Master work subjects with Black images or revealing the fantasies held about Black men and women, the subtext is race and sex and the power...
“Heath began painting in 1989 at the age of forty. Rising early to go to work as a taxi driver he would see the homeless bent over trash bins looking for food. In the shallow morning light they looked like oblique shapes and forms. Out of the...
“Here, the artist blends elements of color into shapes and forms to explore salvation and the terms under which his winged and hooded figure, manipulating a marionette whose actions are predicated under the guise of Christianity, delivers it. His...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Croplands; Agriculture; Farming; Landscapes (Representations); Men; Adults; Working class; Laborers; Agricultural laborers; People associated with manual labor; People associated with agriculture; Walking; Gestures;...
"Though its exact date is unknown, the nature of the brushwork and general intensity of style suggest late 1888 or early 1889 while van Gogh was still in Arles, the village in Provence [...]. It may even have been executed after van Gogh...
"Watercolor view of the northern exedra: it represents a trial in progress, with movable wooden structures. In the central niche can be seen the group of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius; statues are set in the framed niches along the...
Photogravures; Prints; Photographs; Cityscape photographs; Cities & towns; Cityscapes; City & town life; Roads; Streets; Winter; Snow; Carriages & coaches; Vehicles; Horses; Animals; Architecture; Buildings; Gates; Trees
"In his own art […] Stieglitz had moved quite sharply away from the pictorialism of his early work toward ever-more 'straight' photography - that is, toward photographs that look like photographs, free of lens or darkroom manipulations...
"Polke's work frequently juxtaposes images wrenched from different periods of history. At the bottom left he makes use of a collage by the early twentieth-century Surrealist Max Ernst, whilst the central image derives from a satirical etching...
"The assertive flatness of the implacable field of red is emphasized by the linear vertical 'zips'. Rather than functioning as 'drawing' within space, these reinforce and delimit the space as a whole. White 'zips' in Newman's works also evoke...
"In her consistent use of grids Agnes Martin participated in a tradition in twentieth-century art stretching from the Cubists and Mondrian to her Minimalist contemporaries. The grid was a non-hierarchical and non-referential structure. It...
"The painting anthologizes Dali's obsessions of the moment." (Caption); "As a result of Santos Torroella's dedicated researches, it is now generally accepted that the two heads in The Birth of Venus represent those of Lorca [Federico...
"The text on the label punningly translates as 'beautiful breath/veil water'. Duchamp's female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, peers out from above it." (Caption, p.54); "Among Duchamp's strangest gestures had been the creation of a female...
"Each of On Kawara's Date Paintings is individualized to some degree. Typefaces vary, as do the colors. They are always horizontal in format but each one corresponds to one of eight predetermined sizes." (Caption, p.178); "Much as...
"Alongside his own production of visual poetry, which took the form of silkscreen prints as well as inscribed objects, Finlay was significant for his involvement in the 'small press' publishing activities associated with the alternative poetry...
Five white canvases with pupae, steel shelves with potted flowers, bowls of sugar-water solution, table, radiators, humidifiers, and live butterflies; "There was a lyrical quality to Hirst's use of butterflies' lifecycles, both in the 1991...
"There was a lyrical quality to Hirst's use of butterflies' lifecycles, both in the 1991 installation In and Out of Love, and the related 1994-5 series of paintings, of which I Love You forms part." (Caption, p.231); "By contrast to...
Photograph of exhibition installation, ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), London, September-October 1953; "In this early Independent Group exhibition photographs of varying sizes were attached to the gallery walls. Others were suspended by...
Sculpture; Mixed media; Maps; Recycling; Conservation of natural resources; Economics; Economic & political systems; Political issues; Politics & government
"It was not until the end of the 1970s, in the work of a new generation of sculptors including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, and Bill Woodrow, that the sculptural object as such, in relation to human or urban themes, reassumed...
Galvanized steel and concrete. "Deacon's organically related forms often derive from sources in the Bible, poetry, fairy stories, and figures of speech. In the two versions of the laminated wood sculpture For Those Who Have Ears (1982-3), for...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works
"In the mid-1980s Richter produced abstract paintings as well as realist 'photo-paintings'. […] he appeared here to be recapitulating the ideological options underpinning postwar modernism in so far as his own transplantation from Eastern to...
