MODERN MASTERS

MODERN MASTERS:

European from The Museum of

Edited by William S. Lieberman

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The exhibition was made possible by a grant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from Knoll International. The loan of the works of art was made possible, in part, by a grant to The from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, in Washington, D.C. This volume was published to accompany the exhibition of fifty-one paintings from The Museum of Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 5-September 21, 1980.

Copyright © 1980 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Modern masters.

"Volume ... to accompany the exhibition of fifty­ one paintings from the Museum of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 5-September 21, 1980." 1. , European-Catalogs. 2. Painting Modern, --Europe-Catalogs. 3. Painting, Modern-20th century-Europe- Cata­ logs. 4. New York (City). Museum of Modern Art­ Catalogs. I. Lieberman, William Slattery, 1924- II. New York (City). Museum of Modern Art. I] I. New York (City). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ND457 .M62 759.06'074'01471 80-17459 ISBN 0-87099-246-5 (pbk.)

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Bradford D. Kelleher, Publisher John P. O'Neill, Editor in Chief Joanna Ekman, Copy Editor Peter Oldenburg, Designer

Cover: Paul Cezanne, The Bather (photograph: Sandak, Inc.) FOREWORD

Modern Masters: European Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art puts on exhibition some fifty European works acquired by The Mu­ seum of Modern Art, New York, between 1934 and 1979. The paintings shown date from 1885 to 1950. This selection does not, of course, at­ tempt to be a comprehensive view of The Museum of Modern Art's holdings. Paintings by the Futurists and by Mondrian, for instance, had previously been promised on loan elsewhere and therefore could not be included here. Nevertheless, even without works by these artists or by Picasso - the latter reserved for the exhibition : A Retrospective, with which The Museum of Modern Art concludes its Fiftieth Anniversary Year- Modern Masters provides not only a con­ stellation of European masterworks but also a group of paintings essential to the history of the modern movement. Astonishingly enough, all of these works are owned by one museum. On behalf of the Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Modern Masters, as well as to confirm the Metro­ politan's own participation in the Picasso retrospective. To that exten­ sive survey of Picasso's art, the Metropolitan has loaned eight major paintings and drawings. Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has devel­ oped an attentive audience, first in New York, and then nationally and internationally. It has also attracted many generous donors. Chief among them, as indicated in this selection, were Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, her son Nelson A. Rockefeller, and James Thrall Soby. Not all the paintings included in Modern Masters are unfamiliar to the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. Mira's stunning mural, for instance, was welcomed here in 1967. It is a particular pleasure to bring back five paintings first shown by the Metropolitan Museum some sixty years ago. What was that exhibition, and which were the paintings included in it? Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings opened at The Met­ ropolitan Museum of Art in May 1921. That survey, containing 127 works, began with Courbet and Manet and ended with Matisse and Picasso. The selection was limited to European artists, and most of the works were French.

5 The five paintings featured in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings now shown again are: Cezanne's The Bather and his Still Life with Apples (nos. 5-6), Gauguin's The and the Earth (no. 20), and Redan's Silence (no. 43)- these four lent anonymously by a col­ lector and a dealer- and Derain's Window at Vers (no. 14), lent by a New York lawyer, the legendary John Quinn. Today, several additional paintings from that exhibition are permanently installed in the Metro­ politan Museum's recently opened Andre Meyer Galleries, which display our collection of nineteenth-century European painting and . The circumstances and purpose of the 1921 exhibition, and the criti­ cal and public response to it, deserve further study. Bryson Burroughs, then Curator of Paintings, wrote a precise and perceptive introduction to the accompanying catalogue. The show, he said, "was undertaken in response to a request from a group of art lovers - Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham, Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, Arthur B. Davies, Paul Dougherty, Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Jr., John Quinn, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney- who felt that the educational value of such an exhibition would be greater if held in our Museum, where the modern works could be easily com­ pared with examples of art of long-recognized excellence, shown in near-by galleries." Modern Masters is not only a harvest of paintings from the collec­ tion of The Museum of Modern Art. It is also a tribute to that museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and to his leadership, scholarship, and vision. No other individual in the museum profession so influenced the way we look at the visual arts of our time. In the preparation of Modern Masters, I wish to acknowledge the warm collaboration of Richard E. Oldenburg, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, and of his supportive staff. I also want to thank those at the Metropolitan Museum who have been responsible for the exhibi­ tion itself as well as for its catalogue. The loan of these works of art was made possible, in part, by a grant to The Museum of Modern Art from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. The exhibition was made possible by a grant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from Knoll International.

Philippe de Montebello Director

6 MODERN MASTERS 1. FRANCIS BACON, British (1909-

Study of a Baboon (1953)

Oil on canvas, 6ft. 6 in. x 4ft. 6 in. (198 x 137.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1979

Illustration is, for most of our painters, an original sin which they labor strenuously to be absolved of. Mr. Bacon is a master of this despised aesthetic atavism and does not hesitate to flaunt this mastery. He gets away with it, too. For he is also in possession of an unerring pictorial intelligence. He is one of those painters who appears to achieve exact­ ly what he sets out to achieve. Clearly he has a lot more on his mind than exercises in technical ex­ cellence, however. He is a visionary of a particular sort - a specialist in the grotesqueries of modern life. He is a connoisseur of extreme emotions, with a taste for the macabre and a gift for transmuting the psychopathology of everyday life into a compelling and very personal pictorial imagery. There is nothing of the commonplace in his work. Everything is pitched to the intensity of a scream. The pressure is unremitting, a little brutal, and more than a little calculated. Yet, despite the calculation, it has the force of an involuntary avowal. Hilton Kramer The Age of the A vant-Garde

Bacon is fascinated by the drama of contemporary existence as record­ ed in the pictorial sections of the press. Photographic quotations, thor­ oughly transformed, are often used in his work. One of his favorite books - "his bible," as a friend of his put it, is Marius Maxwell's Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, published in 1925 by William Heinemann, Ltd~ The photographs are chiefly of large wild animals such as the elephant and the rhinoceros, but among the plates is a remarkable photograph of baboons in acacia trees. The ape at the right is perched on a forked tree trunk extremely like that in Bacon's Study of a Baboon. But how to explain the wire cage in which Bacon's ape is half imprisoned? ... The story, probably apocryphal, is that he was fascinated to see monkeys of various kinds caged in the parks, while outside others roamed in freedom. James Thrall Soby The James Thrall Soby Collection

8 2. MAX BECKMANN, German (1884-1950)

Departure (1932-33)

Oil on canvas; triptych, center panel 7 ft. 3/4 in. x 45 3/8 in. (215.3 x 115.2 em.), side panels each 7 ft. 3/4 in. x 391/4 in. (215.3 x 99.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art. New York, Given anonymously (by exchange), 1964

The Gothic spirit inherent in Departure is most strikingly evident in the contrast between the serene otherworldliness of the center section and the violence of the wings. The latter depict dark nightmarish scenes of brutality and degradation. On one side a stocky man in a striped polo shirt holds aloft a bludgeonlike bag of fish, as though about to "ex­ ecute" a partially clothed woman who kneels at his feet with her arms bound stiffly above her . She bends over a round, green object that has been thought to be a glass globe. A newspaper- one can easi­ ly read "ZEITU(NG)" -lies on the floor immediately to the right of the woman and the strange green object. Directly beyond the brutal execu­ tioner looms the strictly frontal form of a naked, gagged, and mutilated man of corpselike paleness, whose bloody stumps of arms are tied above his head to a stumpy column. Still another male figure stands in a waste barrel with his hands shackled together behind his back. He faces directly into a column. Between a third column and the inner edge of the panel, part of a dark, barred window can be seen. The low ceiling and otherwise constricted space of the room, together with the presence of bars, suggests a prison or a torture chamber, while the bar­ barous, closely spaced columns are suggestive of a pagan temple .... Opposite this image of sadism and debasement, the right panel pre­ sents a scene which, if less violent, is equally charged with an atmos­ phere of degradation and suffering. On the stage of a dimly lit theater appear a strange couple. The woman is clothed in a queer white gar­ ment - apparently her nightdress - which reaches to the floor but leaves one side of her body exposed. She carries an old-fashioned kerosene lamp; however, her face and shoulders are in deep shadow. Trussed to her body is the inverted and rigid form of a man dressed only in a short-sleeved, yellow-green shirt. This unhappy couple is escorted by a blindfolded figure in an usher's uniform. Under his arm he carries a long fish, a symbol frequently met in Beckmann's paint­ ings after the mid 1920's. Occupying the stage with these figures is a small naked child ... who makes a gesture of shame or revulsion. Out front in the pit a man in a curious costume beats a big bass drum. His ermine-collared coat and trinket-laden cap recall the wily French King

9 Louis XI. Finally, through a narrow gap to one side of the backdrop at the rear of the stage, shadowy little figures can be seen peering down from balustraded stairs or galleries. The brutal, bizarre scenes of the two side panels are staged within equally cramped and confining interior settings: a seedy, tarnished theater balancing an unholy temple of depravity. In strong contrast to the violence and oppressiveness of these scenes, the central panel, dominated by broad expanses of clear primary colors, shows a group of heroic figures standing calmly in a small boat upon the open sea. A family of three- a sort of Holy Family- appears between two majes­ tic figures, one draped in red, the other in blue. The figure in red is a savage hooded being who grasps a huge fish with both hands. His com­ panion is a crowned Christ-like personage, who holds a fully laden net in his left hand while making a blessing with his right .... Beckmann was determined that his art should defy the political at­ mosphere generated by the Nazi revolution. The inner conflict that now possessed him first found release in the great triptych, Departure. Although [Perry] Rathbone [Max Beckmann, Ex. cat. (St. Louis: City Art Museum. 1948), pp. 35-36] suggests that the meaning of the trip­ tych is more religious than political, he also notes that Beckmann thought it best to hide the finished painting in an attic, and "lest its provocative content arouse the suspicions of the Nazis, he labelled the back of the canvas, 'Scenes from Shakespeare's Tempest.'" Charles S. Kessler Max Beckmann's Triptychs

3. , French {1882-1963)

Man with a Guitar {1911)

Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 317/8 in. (116.2 x 80.9 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1945

In the summer of 1911, both Picasso and Braque vacationed at Ceret, a village in the French Pyrenees, where they executed a group of paint­ ings that articulates the culminating statement of the more difficult and rarefied style of 1910 and presents the climax of the preliminary adventure of .... The figure paintings of the summer of 1911, exemplified by Braque's Man with a Guitar and Picasso's Accordionist [The Solomon R. Gug­ genheim Museum), likewise attest to the Cubists' increasingly enig-

10 matic image of reality .... The space in these paintings has now be­ come so shallow that at times the dissected planes appear almost to hover in front of the picture plane, rather than behind it. The vocabu­ lary, too, has been regularized to almost exclusively rectilinear and curvilinear elements. Together with this development, the degree of fragmentation has progressed so far that, at first glance, the reference to reality is barely possible to ascertain .... both Braque and Picasso often provide realistic clues to carry us into the more arcane passages, where lines and planes seem to refer to nothing but themselves. In both these works, for example, a scroll form at the lower left (repeated in the Picasso at the lower right and in the Braque at the upper right) lo­ cates an extremity of the chair in which the musician is seated. Sud­ denly, in the Braque, the cylinders of sleeves, the half-circles of but­ tons, the parallels of fingers may be discerned, and with them, the ap­ proximate location of torso, shoulders, neck, and head. And, further to relate the forms to reality, the upper left-hand corner shows a curl of curtain cord on a [trompe-l'oeil] nail. ... It is astonishing to see how closely Braque's art and Picasso's have converged in the pursuit of this new pictorial world .... But, for all the ostensible anonymity of the Cubist style of 1911, differences between the two masters are still discernible. Typically, the rhythms of the Picasso are sharper and more strident (especially in the tense, unstable form of the narrow central triangle); and the alternations of light and dark are comparably more sudden and nervous. Braque, by contrast, retains a greater suppleness in his transitions and a more obvious equi­ librium of structure, as in the lucid network of perpendiculars coun­ tered by the more predictable repetitions of a diagonal. Robert Rosenblum Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

11 4. GEORGES BRAQUE, French (1882-1963)

The Table (1928)

Oil on canvas, 70 3/4 x 28 3/4 in. (179.7 x 73 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1941

During the decade 1918-2.8, Braque maintained his mastery of the late synthetic Cubist idiom by unremitting efforts to make it suppler, less strict and, humanly speaking, more meaningful. He constantly varied the size and shape of his canvases: horizontals alternate with verticals, large with small, square with elongated. His paint is sometimes lus­ cious, sometimes dry. Likewise, Braque' s color harmonies and his han­ dling of form varied constantly, even within groups of works of the same date: somber changes to light, compressed to flabby and extend­ ed, angular to rounded and free flowing .... Braque's ... sequence of rather more than fifteen Gueridons - this classification is misleading, but no other generic noun is as convenient -were painted at intervals between 1921 and the end of 1930, and he was to paint others still later. Having said that this classification is "misleading," I shall now try to explain. First, though in every case a still life on a table provides the subject of the picture, Braque did not always represent a gueridon, but changed to a rectangular wooden table with four legs, which are sometimes straight and at other times undulating .... The second point to make is that there is no "sequence" in these paintings beyond the fact that they were begun and finished at certain dates. That is to say, they were not conceived as a continu­ ous series: some were painted singly, others worked on contempora­ neously in groups. There is no progression from one to another, but only modifications or changes in style, composition and choice of objects .... Four table still-lifes painted by Braque in 1928-29 ... form a homo- geneous group and should be considered together .... This group of pictures marks an important change of style in Braque's painting, which involved his choice of colors, his use of paint and his handling of space. Indeed, it is a change which amounts to a rejection both of the tonal resonance and of the seductive and delectable beauty of his works of the previous ten years, in favor of a drier more economical and yet fuller experience of reality. All of a sudden, Braque gave up his previous palette of dark brown, tan, olive green, pale ochre, dark grey, black and white and changed to a scale of more luminous colors -

12 lemon yellow, viridi.an green, , beige, light grey- used in counterpoint with black and white. At the same time, Braque ex­ changed his former loose brushwork and rich oily paint for thin washes of color evenly applied over a layer of gesso mixed with sand. This gives his paintings a granular, matt, fresco-like appearance, with a dry, rough surface which arouses tactile sensations of a different order. Douglas Cooper Braque: The Great Years

5. PAUL CEZANNE, French (1839-1906) The Bather (c.1885)

Oil on canvas, 50 x 381/8 in. (127 x 96.8 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Matisse believed that when Pissarro referred to a picture that Cezanne had been painting "all his life" he had in mind Cezanne's endless series of bathers. Typical is the lithograph .... with its clumsy studio figures awkwardly disposed in a landscape which seems a bit too small for them. The lithograph, though Cezanne drew it on the stone in 1899, is actually a variant of a composition of 1876. The central stand­ ing bather is closely related to the figure in the [Museum of Modern Art's] canvas The Bather painted a dozen years later. Both figures have their source in a photograph ... found pasted on the back of a Cezanne drawing, and now in the Museum's possession .... it reveals Cezanne's greatness as few of the numerous photographs of his landscape motifs can. Cezanne, a very shy man with more than his share of nineteenth­ century inhibitions, could rarely endure working directly from the model. Furthermore the living model could probably not have endured Cezanne who tyrannically insisted upon even his portrait sub­ jects' keeping as "still as an apple" through a hundred sittings. So Cezanne sometimes depended upon photographs of professional models. This slightly ridiculous image of a naked young man with a mus­ tache Cezanne transforms into one of his most monumental paintings of the single figure. Cezanne generalizes somewhat, suppressing the idiosyncrasies of the model but without idealizing. Indeed the original humility of the individual is curiously preserved yet modified by 13 Cezanne's intuitive sense of human dignity. Academically the drawing is poor, the right knee inexcusable, but seen as a whole the figure stands firm as a stone. In fact, it rises before one like a colossus who has just bestrode mountains and rivers - for Cezanne, adapting a landscape from another picture, has again fumbled his naturalistic scale while achieving artistic grandeur. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

6. PAUL CEZANNE, French (1839-1906)

Still Life with Apples (1895-98)

Oil on canvas, 27 x 361/2 in. {68.6 x 92.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

The still life provided Cezanne with a subject ideally suited to his ana­ lytical, contemplative manner of working. To obtain contrasts of color and form, he could choose and arrange objects, which would remain immobile under his protracted scrutiny .... a lemon, apples, and a glass are placed upon a rumpled white napkin thrown over an underlying tablecloth. Behind them stand a compotier and a figured jug, and at the left are folds of a patterned drapery. Cezanne took from the Impressionists, with whom he was briefly associated, the practice of painting directly from nature with small touches of pure, luminous color. But whereas the Impressionists tried to capture momentary effects and preferred high-keyed tones that made objects appear to dissolve in a shimmer of light and atmosphere, Cezanne sought instead to emphasize the solidity and basic geometric structure of his forms, and to create a sense of permanence rather than transience. To achieve his aim, he closely observed the manner in which local colors appear altered by the recession of planes and the reflection of adjacent objects. These modulations he translated by small, elongated strokes into a system of tonal gradations. Intensely concentrated obser­ vation of his motif was followed by painstaking selection of the colors that would best render each nuance and enable him, in his own phrase, to "realize his sensations before nature," confident that "when the color has its appropriate richness, the form will attain its full volume."

14 The Still Life with Apples, like the earlier Bather [no. 5], shows Cezanne's subtle distortions of nature. The table top is uptilted, and outlines are discontinuous to indicate the existence of multiple planes shifting in depth. As in The Bather, the handling of the brushstrokes makes us realize that we are not looking at a literal representation of nature but at a painting that reconstructs the artist's response to it. This, however, is not the intensely subjective response of an expres­ sionist such as , for example, whose Starry Night [no. 21] makes us as aware of his own emotion as of the scene he portrays. While fully conscious of the voluptuous appeal of his motif, Cezanne's approach is more objective. He externalizes his sensations, analyzes what produces them, and concentrates on the problems of transcribing them. He offers both an intellectual and a sensuous experience. Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

7. PAUL CEZANNE, French (1839-1906)

Ch~teau Noir (1904-06)

Oil on canvas, 29 x 363/4 in. (73.6 x 93.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy, 1957

The paintings of Cezanne's last years have an epic largeness. He sees nobly and builds with a few clear objects; but these are tremendously alive, throbbing with color and the powerful rhythm of the brush strokes. Each area approaches an ultimate of movement and depth, within the limits of simplicity and grandeur of form. The strokes have become larger and more impassioned, the silhouettes more flickering in their contention with neighboring tones. In this impulse-charged rendering of great masses, the smallest inflections count, without ap­ pearing contrived. The pliant tree at the left, the thin wavering lines of branches in the sky at the right are responding forms, which seem to flow from the rhythm of the surrounding strokes. The irregular and, in places, flame-like silhouette of the trees against the sky and building has no drawn outline, but owes its moving form to the life within the colored mass. It is contrasted with the regular forms of the building-

15 a stable ruin, in which we feel, however, through the patched, hot col­ oring and vibrant edges, the pulse and instability of life. It is an ex­ alted, passionate meditation, in which the great constants of forest, the building, and the sky are suffused with the artist's deep fervor. Its simplicity belongs to the greatest masters. In the middle of the space is the roofless building with severely vertical and horizontal forms, like the canvas itself, and with burning tones; it is marked, near the center of the canvas, by a red door. This bare right­ angled form, cut diagonally by the trees, and itself asymmetrical and broadly diagonal in profile through its stepped lines, resists and is ab­ sorbed into a more unstable whole of great asymmetrical zones - the deep blue sky and the darker trees below which slope across the entire canvas. (The yellow spot reserved in the lower left corner is a neces­ sary element of this diagonal drift.) The third dimension is achieved by the barest means, without a sin­ gle horizontal plane and with only the slightest element of foreshorten­ ing, by the overlapping of the three large masses of trees, building, and sky, and by the unequal intervals of brightness in the series of three major tones. Paul Cezanne

8. , French (b. Russia) (1887-

Calvary (1912)

Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 83/4 in. x 6ft. 33/4 in. (174.6 x 192.4 em.), The Museum of Modern Art. New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1949

Familiar indeed are Chagall' s illustrations to the Old Testament, in painting and drawing, most eloquently in prints, and most recently in sculpture, ceramics, and stained glass. Chagall's "message biblique" is very much his own, and he incorporates within it a single but essential fact of the New Testament, Christ's death on the cross. Chagall' s first painting of the visual focus of Christian worship re­ mains his most successful. [His] representation may seem unorthodox to a Christian - but, as subject, how very much more unexpected it must seem to a Jew! What is represented is easily recognized. Chagall's

16 8. Marc Chagall, Calvary interpretation, however, in no way conforms to any Christian example. His composition is asymmetric. On the bank of a river, Christ cruci­ fied is shown as a child, and Joseph and Mary stand at His feet. On the river a man paddles a boat. At the right, a ladder, here not an in­ strument of the Passion, is carried by a turbaned man whom Chagall has identified as evil, as Judas. As he scuttles away he glances back at the victim of his betrayal. When Alfred Barr acquired the painting for The Museum of Modern Art in 1949, he asked Chagall to describe the composition. Chagall replied in English:

When I painted this picture in , I was freeing myself psychologically and plastically from the conception of the icon painters and from Rus­ sian art in general .... The bearded man is the child's father. He is my father and everybody's father .... The river, which is the river of my native town, flows very peacefully .... The figure and the boat represent the element of calmness in life as a contrast to the strangeness and the tragedy .... Unfortunately, this Judas is an invention of mine. I say "un­ fortunately" because I was a little afraid of his apparition. He is not in keeping with the traditional Judas. However, I gave him a ladder because I wanted to bring him down to an intimate level .... When I painted Christ's parents, I wanted to bring them down to more intimate dimen­ sions, as with Judas, and I was thinking of my own parents. My mother was about half the size of my father when they got married .... The sym­ bolic figure of Christ was always very near to me, and I was determined to bring it out of my young heart. I wanted to show Christ as a young child. Now I see him otherwise. [Chagall to Barr, Oct. 11, 1949, Museum of Modern Art] "Now I see him otherwise." Chagall's later portrayals of the Crucifix­ ion, which are many, begin in 1938. They differ but are no less per­ sonal. Christ appears, quite literally, as the King of the and wears, as a loincloth, their prayer shawl. In Chagall's mind, the crucified figure became a symbol of the tragedy of the Jews in Nazi Europe. In several versions, the flames of holocaust recall those pogroms that Chagall himself had witnessed in Russia many years before.

W.S.L. A Treasury of Modern Drawing

18 9. , Italian (1888-1978)

Gare Montpamasse (The Melancholy of Departure) (1914)

Oil on canvas. 4 ft. 71/8 in. x 6 ft. 5/8 in. (140 x 184.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art. New York. Gift of fames Thrall Soby. 1969

The Gore Montpornosse is unique in de Chirico's early oeuvre in that it overtly depicts a modern, commercial structure, drastically rebuilt in recent years. Yet in its atmosphere of timelessness the image evokes a sense of a remote, hushed past quite as forcefully as those paintings in which the artist refers, however obliquely, to medieval, Renaissance or neo-classic buildings. And what a strange vision this is! In the fore­ ground a bunch of green bananas inhabits an enclosed wasteland of concrete and iron, without plausible exit. This is a station at which presumably no trains will arrive, from which none will depart. The train in the background is distant and stalled, approached only by the two ghosts of travelers who have climbed the steep ramp, one imag­ ines, only to abandon hope. The silence and inertia are absolute. The picture ... is the absolute antithesis of paintings by the Italian Futurists in which the commotion and excitement of travel are feverishly sug­ gested. According to legend, de Chirico at this phase of his career was des­ perately homesick for and thought often of returning there, only to lose hope because of the costs and complexities of the journey. Cer- tainly the Gore Montpornosse is uncannily effective as a dream image of the longings and frustrations of a trip planned by rail (the Montpar­ nasse station was the one nearest to de Chirico's studio) .... it conveys the torment of nightmares in which a train must be caught for reasons of exceptional importance. But the Gore also suggests the calm which comes to the traveler when hope of reaching the plat­ form on time has been abandoned, when there is nothing to do but wait for the hours to become meaningful again. The picture's ambiva­ lence of mood is characteristic of de Chirico's early art as a whole. In­ deed, metamorphoses of mood are among this art's rarest virtues. Moreover, even in a physical sense de Chirico's paintings, sparsely achieved as to technique, have an extraordinary capacity to change in color and light, when looked at under varying conditions. To borrow a phrase from the terminology of photographic chemistry, they tend to "come up" in detail and then to recede in brilliance. They do not so

19 much propose metamorphosis by lyric allusion as they seem them­ selves to undergo it in actuality. They are for this reason, among others, far more disturbing than paintings by certain surrealist artists in which one set of appearances has been superimposed on another. They are trompe l'oeil, that is to say, in spirit rather than handling. James Thrall Soby Giorgio de Chirico

10. GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, Italian (1888-1978)

The Song of Love (1914)

Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 231/2 in. (73.1 x 59.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest, 1979

Whereas in [de Chirico's] 1913 paintings of deserted squares with in­ animate objects, still life had remained for the most part an accessory to architecture, now it began to do more than decorate or disturb his strange settings, growing larger in scale and importance. Moreover, the very character of his still-life vocabulary tended to become more ex­ otic. During the previous year he had mostly confined himself to plaster fragments of statuary and such homely edibles as fruit and vegetables. In 1914 he added cryptic objects, seen or imagined on his solitary walks through the streets of Paris. The change is apparent in the most widely reproduced of his 1914 stilllifes - The Song of Love, whose insolent and gratuitous juxtaposi­ tion of a surgeon's rubber glove with a plaster head of the Apollo Bel- vedere, summarized for many slightly later painters of surrealist ten­ dency that need for a drastic reshuffling of reality of which Lautre­ amont had referred in the famous proto-surrealist sentence, "Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." ... The Song of Love was avidly admired and emulated in and . As an example, the critic and dealer, E.L. T. Mesens, has described what the picture meant to himself and to his friend and countryman, the painter Rene Magritte: "Soon after (around 1919) a reproduction of The Song of Love by de, Chirico fell into our hands. We were fascinated. Several days later Magritte discovered in a shop a booklet published by and devoted to the same painter. A unique emotion engulfed us. The encounter with the work of de

20 10. Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love Chirico was so overwhelming that it determined the point of departure for Magritte's research." [E.L.T. Mesens, "Rene Magritte," Peintres Belges Contemporains (, Les Editions Lumiere, 1945 (?)), p. 158] The derivation of the glove motif in The Song of Love is a rather complex matter. As mentioned, the glove is a rubber one such as sur­ geons wear. De Chirico may well have seen its prototype in a phar­ macy window, together with the anatomical charts which appear in several of his pictures. Such objects may have had a particular interest for the painter in that he himself still suffered from chronic intestinal disorders and is said by friends to have been something of a hypochon­ driac .... De Chirico's still-life drama has no traceable plot, of course; its im­ pact derives from the mystery of assortment of the various elements. But it conveys a considerable sense of shock, and one is again remind­ ed of the words of : "To describe the fatal char­ acter of contemporary things, the painter [de Chirico] uses that most modern recourse - surprise." ["Le 30e Salon des Independants," Les Soirees de Paris, no. 22 (Paris, Mar. 15, 1914), p. 186] And what makes de Chirico's disruption of conventional reality so memorable in The Song of Love, is that it is regulated by a severe, underlying plastic discipline. The counter-logic of the young Italian artist's iconography has been imitated by numerous painters but seldom with a conviction comparable to his. James Thrall Soby Giorgio de Chirico

11. LOVIS CORINTH, German (1858-1925)

Self-Portrait (1924)

Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 5/8 in. (100 x 80.3 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Curt Valentin, 1950

The German painter Lovis Corinth, more than twenty years the senior of his compatriots Beckmann and Kirchner, was born in the generation of Seurat and Ensor. For many years he painted successfully in an academic style with an extraordinary, if pedestrian, technical facility. He excelled at portraiture and received countless commissions. He also painted nudes and illustrated classical and biblical myths. His renditions were literal, often sensual, and sometimes extravagant.

22 When he reached the age of fifty-five, shortly before World War I, Corinth's art underwent a profound and rapid change for which there seems to be neither biographical nor spiritual reason. His brushwork became more free, even virtuosic, his attitude more introspective and at the same time sympathetic. The liberation and development of his later style was undoubtedly influenced by the example of younger art­ ists, Expressionist painters such as Beckmann and Nolde. Corinth painted some of the greatest portraits of the twentieth cen­ tury, and, like so many Expressionists, he was obsessed by his own im­ age, which he depicted over and over again in paintings, drawing, and prints. Beckmann's anguished search might well have been Corinth's own: "It is the quest of our ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all explore. What am I? This is the ques­ tion that constantly persecutes and torments me." This over-life-size representation of himself, one of the last of Cor­ inth's many self-portraits, was painted a few months before his death. It is rare in the art of the twentieth century that an artist can capture such a deep and convincing feeling for the human personality. The comparison which Corinth invites to Rembrandt is denied by the gray and tan colors of the painting. W.S.L. Modern Masters

12. HILAIRE-GERMAIN-, French {1834-1917)

At the Milliner's (c. 1882)

Pastel, 27 5/8 x 27 3/4 in. (70.2 x 70.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy, 1957

Though At the Milliner's is ... one of the earliest paintings in The Museum of Modern Art, at the time it was done it epitomized moderni­ ty. Its lay in its touches of pure color, with the high-keyed tones favored by the Impressionists contrasting with darker areas: the choice of a contemporary, even trivial, subject; and, especially, the daring composition with uptilted perspective and figures cut by the framing edges. We view the scene as if in a snapshot; but, although Degas was in fact interested in photography, it was probably also a growing familiarity with Japanese prints, then much appreciated in

23 12. Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, At the Milliner's Paris, that led him and other artists of the time to adopt the seemingly casual composition of their pictures, as well as a high vantage point that contradicts the traditional Western scheme of deep perspective, in which lines converge toward a single vanishing point. Degas once defined the abiding principle of art as "the summing up of life in its essential gestures." His interest in occupational attitudes led to his many studies of ballet dancers, women bathing, and laun­ dresses washing or ironing. At the Milliner's is one of more than a dozen works that he made at about this date with a millinery shop as the subject. Here, he has caught in one vivid glimpse both the pleased expression and the gesture of the woman trying on a bonnet, as well as the action of the attendant proffering two others for her approval. The picture is rendered in pastel, a medium Degas made particularly his own. He preferred its mat surface to the gloss of oil pigments and liked the freedom it gave him to draw rapidly in color, using broken lines to convey the blurred effect of figures seen in action. The model for the woman trying on the hat was the American painter , who lived and worked in France as a close associate of the Impressionists. She was in large part responsible for stimulating interest in their art in the United States and encouraging patrons in this country to buy their works.

Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

13. ANDRE DERAIN, French (1880-1954)

London Bridge (1906)

Oil on canvas, 26 x 39 in. (66 x 99.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Zadok, 1952

"What is presented to us here - apart from the materials employed - has nothing to do with painting: some formless confusion of colors; blue, red, yellow, green, the barbaric and naive sport of a child who plays with the box of colors he has just got as a Christmas present." Thus did a newspaper critic greet the gallery in the Autumn Salon of 1905 where the earliest wave of twentieth-century innovators, later called the fauves, was scandalizing the Paris public. Matisse was the greatest artist and the dominant personality among them, but his leadership, though accepted by his disciple Derain, was

25 14. Andre Derain, Window at Vers contested by his rival Vlaminck and ignored by his friend Rouault. In the following year, 1906, the group received its name les fauves, "the wild beasts" and reached the zenith of its influence; but before the end of 1907 the "color-mad" fauves were beginning to submit to the disci­ plinary influence of Cezanne, who had just died, and the structural innovations of the youthful Picasso who had just completed Les Demoiselles d'A vignon. Looking at Derain' s [London Bridge] one can easily understand why fauve color seemed so shocking. Cezanne, Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin had all in their various ways and for differing purposes departed from "natural" color, but fauve color was far brighter and far more boldly independent of the "normal" color of the objects and even of their shapes. Yet in [London Bridge] a reaction toward a more solid structure within a deeper picture space has already set in. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

14. ANDRE DERAIN, French (1880-1954)

Window at Vers (1912)

Oil on canvas, 511/2 x 351/4 in. (130.8 x 89.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, purchased in memory of Mrs. Cor­ nelius J. Sullivan, 1939

Looking back to the years 1905 and 1906, Derain reflected: " was our first ordeal by fire ... Our colors were sticks of dynamite ... The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all in­ itiative and conventional contact ... What was wrong in this attitude was a kind of fear of imitating life." The throbbing effusion of Fauvism, however, was quickly spent. The Window at Vers, a painting postdating Derain's Fauve period by a half-dozen years, illustrates Derain' s new search for structure and discipline or for what Guillaume Apollinaire described as "sobriety and balance." Window at Vers was shown in the year it was painted at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (at the Grafton Galleries) in London. Roger Fry, cicerone of that exhibition, wrote in the catalogue, "A classic spirit is common to the best French works of art of all periods from the twelfth century onwards, and though no one could find direct reminiscences of a Nicolas Poussin here, his spirit seems to revive in

27 the work of artists like Derain." The Parisian dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had lent the Window at Vers to the London exhibition. Kahnweiler was the principal dealer for the Cubist painters, Braque and Picasso, and subsequently Gris and Leger, as well as for van Dongen and Derain, both of whom he had met when they were Fauve painters. In 1913 the Window at Vers crossed the Atlantic to be included in the epic in New York. It was purchased by the American collector of the avant-garde John Quinn, owner also of Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy (no. 44), and then acquired by Mrs. Cornelius J. Sulli­ van in whose memory it was subsequently presented to The Museum of Modern Art by her friend Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in 1939. Some years after Derain's death in 1954, Alfred Barr wrote a brief memorial tribute, part of which appears below. W.S.L.

Forty years ago, in the 1920s, Andre Derain was often spoken of as one of the great triumvirate of painters who dominated modern and, consequently, throughout the world. The other two were Matisse and Picasso. Yet when he died in 1954 Derain's work of his last thirty years was regarded with condescension, even with contempt, and, generally speaking, it still is. Ironically, about the time of his death, his early paintings, the brilliant, spontaneous, semi-abstract fireworks of his fauve period, 1905-1906, were rocketing to heights of esteem, partly because they seemed related to the abstract expressionist art of the 1950s, partly because they were gay and charming in color .... In reaction against his fauve style, Derain's greatest pictures, sober in color, austere in spirit, were painted during the seven years from 1907 to mid-1914 when World War I began. After the war, his art, though easy and popular, declined.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Unpublished notes

28 15. THEO VAN DOES BURG, Dutch (1883-1931)

Rhythm of a Russian (1918)

Oil on canvas, 531/2 x 241/4 in. (135.9 x 61.6 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1946

Throughout the northern capitals of Europe, by the end of World War I, the lesson of Cubism had been communicated by Futurist propa­ ganda and exhibitions. Since the transmission was not direct, the lesson was sometimes inaccurate, and often misunderstood. However, the way a painting could look had been completely revolutionized. Certain artists went further than the Cubists in Paris. A picture could exist on a two-dimensional plane devoid of any illusion of depth. Re­ duction led to pure geometric abstraction, which, in the new techno­ logical age, was considered by some to represent universal and quin­ tessential truth. In the Netherlands, (The Style) was a movement initiated by Dutch artists in neutral Holland during World War I. It reduced the elements of composition to rectangular flat forms, independently ar­ ticulated, asymmetrically placed, and painted in pure colors. Its founders, the painters and Thea van Does burg, opposed an art based on subjectivity and individual sensibility. They tried to establish principles for an art that was objective, universal and collec­ tive. In painting, their plastic means were limited to vertical and hori­ zontal relationships and their color to the three primaries, red, yellow, and blue as well as black, white, and gray. The principles of De Stijl were extended to other disciplines - architecture, furniture design, and city planning. The architect J. J.P. Oud was also a founding member, and the group was later joined by the sculptor Georges Van­ tongerloo (a Belgian), the painter Bart van der Leek, and the designer Gerrit T. Rietveld. Van Does burg, the main spokesman for De Stijl, carried its influence to and France. Through the magazine De Stijl and through his lectures at the in Weimar, as well as in Berlin and Paris, van Doesburg attracted new members and collaborators among ad­ vanced artists working in a variety of directions- the Constructivist painter El Lissitzky, the film maker Hans Richter, and the visionary ar­ chitect Frederick Kiesler among them. De Stijl was also a vision of a new world. Only an art removed from visual reality and constructed by means of the intellect could achieve

29 the pure and the ideal. As a cohesive group, De Stijl was short-lived. Its influence, however, transformed the vision of the twentieth century. Van Doesburg painted the Rhythm of a Russian Dance a year after De Stijl was founded. The composition was preceded by a sequence of seven small drawings that progressively reduce to austere abstraction a first naturalistic sketch of a dancer with his left foot raised. Helen M. Franc has suggested (An Invitation to See [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973], p. 38) that the composition of flat bars is "arranged at right angles to one another in such a way that their shapes, and the spatial intervals between them, are an abstract tran­ scription of the rhythmic, staccato dance movements." W.S.L.

16. KEES VAN DONG EN, French (b. The Netherlands) (1877-1968)

Modjesko, Soprano Singer (1908)

Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rubel, 1955

The cafe concert remained popular well into the twentieth century. In this painting, made almost two decades after Toulouse-Lautrec's at the [no. 51] van Dongen has given us the por­ trait of another cabaret entertainer, a well-known female imper­ sonator. The clashing violence of the colors - unnaturally yellow flesh and dark blue hair topped by a pink and green headdress, with bright red surrounding the figure and isolating it from the pink and mauve background - suggests the strident voice issuing from the heavily rouged lips. The single figure against its flat background is far more like a poster than is Toulouse-Lautrec's La Goulue. In fact, when the Modjesko, Soprano Singer was first shown in a large exhibition of van Dongen's work, in the year that it was painted, the critic Marius-Ary Leblond remarked in the foreword to the catalogue: "Here, the painting con­ denses the poster into art: the person is himself a poster, shrieking in red. [It] offers a new type of art, close to the poster but superior to it, tasteful in another way, presenting the soft sensuousness of paint with a spicy freshness- an art of phantasmagoric virtuosity." Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

30 16. Kees van Dongen, Modjesko, Soprano Singer 17. JEAN DUBUFFET, French (1901-

Grand Band (New Orleans) {1944)

Oil and tempera on canvas, 451/8 x 57 3/4 in. (114.6 x 146.7 em.}, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. , 1968

Dubuffet's Grand Jazz Band was originally owned by the painter Jean Fautrier. It was subsequently acquired by , who intro­ duced Dubuffet's work to an American audience and, on the occasion of the Thirtieth Anniversary of The Museum of Modern Art in 1960, contributed the painting to an auction of fifty modern paintings and sculpture, the sales of which benefited that Museum. At the auction, the painting was acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Bunshaft, friends of the artist.

In 1942 Jean Dubuffet decided to devote his full energies to painting. He was more than forty years of age and, like Gauguin and Matisse, his late decision to become an artist was a considered, irrevocable act. For almost four decades Dubuffet has experimented, relentlessly, with ideas and techniques in every medium he has chosen to explore. With astonishing inventiveness, he has varied the successful methods of his painting, printmaking, sculpture, and, most recently, architec­ ture. In paint, as on paper, Dubuffet usually composes in series, and for each he develops special forms, perspectives, and colors. Grand Jazz Band, New Orleans belongs to the first such series, begun early in 1943 and ending in of 1945, which he later entitled Mario­ nettes of and Country. It consists of more than four hundred paintings, drawings, and lithographs. In Paris in December 1944, a few months after the Liberation, Du­ buffet painted three Jazz Bands - Dirty Style Blues, Black Chicago, and, in this exhibition, New Orleans, the largest of the three. Early in the same year he had shown his work publicly for the first time. The exhibition aroused enormous controversy; the reaction, he noted, in­ cluded "passionate admiration by some, vivid irritation on the part of most, scandal, violent disputes." Of the Jazz Bands Dubuffet has written: "Grand concert. Choir of media. Chorus of all elements inspiring the artist's conception. Hence, reason and logic are singing. Passion, brutality, ferocity, all are singing. Weakness and cowardice too. In unison. And imagination, gratuitous invention, even absurd, incoherent. Obscure aspirations. Frenzy and

32 madness. And at this very moment, the oil melts into colors, which muddy themselves as they come in contact with the surrounding col­ ors, still damp. The hand tries to stop them. But all elements shout loudly, freely. At least in such a way that no restraint is visible; however, there is certain guidance, there is a conductor to direct this orchestra, flexible and subtle." W.S.L. Modern Masters

18. , Belgian (1860-1949) The Tribulations of St. Anthony (1887)

Oil on canvas, 463/8 x 66 in. (117.8 x 167.6 em.). The Museum of Modern Art. New York, Purchase, 1940

In its general subject and composition, Ensor's St. Anthony was direct­ ly inspired by an engraving of about 1635 by Jacques Callot who in turn looks back past the Bruegels to the great late Gothic fantast, Jerome Bosch. At the left sits the Saint surrounded by his immediate temptations one of whom, as in old pictures of the same subject, is a beautiful woman. To the right the fiery mouth of hell belches a swarm of evil phantasms which fill air, land, and sea. The Saint seems dismayed by this cataract of nightmares but legend reassures us: he was staunch against their devilish assaults. Ensor, painting in the late 1880s ... was fully aware of the most ad­ vanced art of his time, since in Brussels each year the Society of the Twenty (Les XX) exhibited the work of the Paris vanguard ... [includ­ ing] Monet and Pissarro. Ensor, who was of English blood, also knew [Turner's] luminous reds and yellows and bold handling of light. Actually Ensor in this astonishing picture went far beyond Impres­ sionism and flatly rejected the scientifically rational theory and tech­ nique of Neo-lmpressionism which was the last word in Paris. He uses any color he pleases and his brush swirls and slashes over his canvas with a freedom which matches the audacity of his imagination. In fact at this moment in his career, Ensor was possibly the boldest pioneer in the art of the period. Gauguin was still painting his gentle pic­ tures of Brittany and only in the following year, 1888, was van Gogh, under the burning sun of Aries, able to free himself from .

33 But Ensor's St. Anthony of 1887 surpasses even the late works of van Gogh and Gauguin in pointing the way to the spontaneous abstract ex­ pressionism of Kandinsky of 25 years later and the unfettered humor and fantasy of Klee and the surrealists Mir6, Ernst, and Masson of our own day. The history of the St. Anthony is interesting. For many years it hung in a place of honor in the Cologne Museum as loan from the owner, Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg of Hanover. Though over 50 years old it was too "modern" for the Nazis, who forced its withdrawal. Baron James Ensor, painter, etcher, writer, composer, was born in Ostend of an English father and a Flemish mother in 1860. He was thus seven years younger than van Gogh and one year younger than Seurat but four years older than Toulouse-Lautrec. He lived in Ostend all his life but took an active part in organizing in Brussels Les XX which was in the 1880s the most progressive art society in the world. Ensor is not only an historic figure of European importance but is also the greatest modern Belgian artist. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

19. LYONEL FEININGER, American (1871-1956) Viaduct (1920)

Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 33 3/4 in. {100.9 x 85.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1944

Lyonel Feininger was fascinated by steamships, trains, and cities. He always remembered vividly that moment when as a child he had first comprehended the engineering feat of New York's Second Avenue Elevated. In the summer of 1906 he took his wife Julia on a promised trip to Paris. They remained in France, on and off, for two years. Fein­ inger sketched the narrow streets, high houses, and busy pedestrians of Paris. He also explored the capital's environs, which were then still suburbs. As always he was fascinated by architecture. One day he found a towering monument, the Aqueduct of Arceuil, which re­ mained throughout his life one of the three chief architectural motifs of his art. The structure consists of two engineering triumphs: the first, a seventeenth-century aqueduct; the second, a viaduct added on top of

34 it in the nineteenth century. One of Feininger' s first paintings in oil was the tall two-storied stone bridge. A dozen years later, Feininger was the first artist to be invited by the architect to join the faculty of the newly created Bau­ haus school in Weimar. There he painted a classic, idealized image of the two-tiered bridge that he had first seen in France. W.S.L. A Treasury of Modern Drawing

Feininger's Viaduct presents a soaring, clearly delineated structure, bathed in radiant light. Botn its mood of timeless serenity and its technique contrast sharply with Derain's London Bridge [no. 13], which shows a major artery of communication with teeming traffic passing over it and boats busily plying the waters below, painted with energetic brushstrokes that convey the turbulence of a modern metropolis. At the age of sixteen, Feininger left his native America and went to live in Germany, where he remained for fifty years. He came into con­ tact with Cubism in 1911 when he exhibited some of his paintings at the Salon des Independants in Paris. At the same time, he became ac­ quainted with Delaunay ... whose preoccupation with color and the way in which light modifies observed reality paralleled Feininger's own interests. Unlike the French Cubists, Feininger wanted his paint­ ings to express "the principle of monumentality"; their broken planes of color and light were never used to break up forms but rather to give them a crystalline clarity. Many of his pictures are of architectural subjocts, and in these works, as Hans Hess has noted: "The emotional content ... is often romantic. The form found for the content is classical in order and law." Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

35 20. , French (1848-1903) The Moon and the Earth (Hina Te Fatou) (1893)

Oil on burlap, 45 x 241/2 in. (114.3 x 62.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Of the brilliant constellation of painters who changed the course of Western art in the 1880s, Paul Gauguin was the most conspicuous and immediately effective. Cezanne transformed Impressionism into something "solid and permanent" by slow, intuitive trial and error; Renoir by emulating the severe drawing of Ingres; van Gogh by tearing the image into ribbons of passionate color; Seurat by systematic, calcu­ lated analysis of form and light. Gauguin's revolt against impression­ ism, though eclectic and perhaps superficial in its result, was even more complete. He studied Manet' s flat tones, the archaic distortions of Egyptian drawing, the climbing perspective and bold spotting of Japanese prints, the rude energy of peasant sculpture in Brittany. These and other elements he began to assimilate about 1886. By the end of the decade he had developed a synthetic style in which almost no trace of Impressionism remained. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Collection of the Societe Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920

The Moon and the Earth was painted in 1893 toward the end of Gauguin's first sojourn in the South Seas Islands. The [Polynesian] legend which is the subject of this picture concerns the moon goddess, Hina, and Tefatu, the earth god. In his monograph on Gauguin, Morice declares that the influence of the missionaries among the Tahitian women had the curious effect of exalting the cult of the feminine divinity, Hina the moon, goddess of deceit and of compassion, at the expense of the severe and good king of the earth. According to the legend, Hina said to Tefatu, "Make man live again after he dies." The earth god replied, "No, I shall never resurrect him. Man shall die; vege­ tation shall die, and those who feed upon it; the earth shall die and come to an end, and shall not be reborn." Hina answered, "Do as you please. But I shall cause the moon to revive." And that which Hina possessed continued to exist. That which Tefatu possessed perished, and man must die. In this painting the bold strong outlines of the figure are contrasted with the decorative flower forms and areas of flat color. Gauguin's in­ debtedness to Egyptian art is apparent in the figure of the woman [the 36 spirit of the moon}, who stands with her head and her feet in profile, her torso full view, and one arm bent at a right angle. It is interesting that this picture once belonged to the painter Degas, who was one of the few to understand and appreciate the work of Gauguin when it was originally exhibited. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Unpublished notes

21. VAN GOGH, Dutch (1853-1890)

The Starry Night (1889)

Oil on canvas, 29 x 361/4 in. (73.7 x 92.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1941

Van Gogh's Starry Night is a work of crucial importance. Not only is it one of the artist's most moving and beautiful paintings but its style marks a turning point in his art, its subject was of special symbolic sig­ nificance to the artist, and the struggle, internal and external, which involved the picture throws a clear light upon one of the fundamental conflicts which have engaged the artists of the past hundred years. This is the conflict between fact and feeling, between prose and poetry, between realism and imaginative vision .... We can follow the conflict in Vincent's letters to Thea van Gogh [The Letters of to his Brother, 1872-1886, 2 vols., and Fur­ ther Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother, 1886-1889 (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1927-1929)] and Emile Bernard [Vincent van Gogh Letters to Emile Bernard, D. Lord, ed., Museum of Modern Art monograph (New York: 1938)]. From Aries in April 1888 van Gogh writes to Bernard: "The imagination is certainly a faculty which we must develop and it alone can bring us to creation of a more exalting and consoling nature ... A star-spangled, sky, for instance, that's a thing I would like to try to do ... But how can I manage unless I make up my mind to work ... from imagination?" A month later he writes again: "I wonder when I'll get my starry sky done, a picture that haunts me always." Within six months in a letter to Theo, Vincent repeats his argument: "To express hope by a star, the eagerness of the soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of ... realism, but is it not something that exists?" .... On June 19, 1889, he writes from Saint-Remy to Theo announcing the new picture: "I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky." ... 37 ... But the new Starry Night and the other pictures from Saint-Remy had passed beyond (Thea's] impressionist taste . . . . it was in the Saint-Remy pictures with their flamboyant cypresses, twisted olive trees and heaving mountains that van Gogh was finally able to free his art from the objective realistic vision of the impression­ ists. The surging lines not only bind the composition into active rhyth­ mic unity- they express magnificently the vehemence and passion of van Gogh's spirit. goes further: it is fundamentally an imaginative in­ vention. The cypress and the distant hills, it is true, occur in other Saint-Remy pictures. But the village with its northern church - is it English or Dutch? - seems remote from Provence. And the sky, the dazzling moon, the Milky Way turned to meteors, the stars like bursting bombshells- this is the unique and overwhelming vision of a mystic, a man in ecstatic communion with heavenly po:wers. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

22. , Spanish {1887-1927)

Guitar and Flowers (1912)

Oil on canvas, 441/8 x 27 5/8 in. (112.1 x 70.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bequest of Anna Erickson Levene in memory of her husband, Dr. Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene, 1947

Although he was not a pioneer in the cubist movement, Juan Gris ranks among its foremost masters. He was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1887, and came to Paris as a young man. There, about 1911, he began to follow in the footsteps of his countryman, Picasso. Even more strictly than his mentor he confined himself in the years before World War I to orthodox cubism, working almost exclusively on small still life compo­ sitions of a modest scale .... Juan Gris died in Paris at the age of forty. His best cubist paintings reveal a precision of style, a concentration and intensity unsurpassed by Picasso himself.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Unpublished notes

38 22. Juan Gris, Guitar and Flowers Though it is very difficult at times to distinguish between the work of Braque and Picasso done in 1911-1912, the paintings of Juan Gris differ markedly from those of both his elders. Gris' work is further removed from impressionism's freedom of composition and brush-stroke. And he is much more systematic. In Guitar and Flowers, for instance, he uses an obviously geometric scheme of design through which the com­ position is given an initial order by dividing the canvas in half four ways: vertically, horizontally and twice diagonally. He then proceeds to adorn and partially to conceal his geometry by means of the con­ sistently fragmented images of a table cover, fruit, a guitar, a vase of flowers and a curtain, drawn aside at the right. The paint is laid on in regular strokes, the color restrained. The result may seem calculated and rather cold. Yet, when the painting is studied, its clarity and sustained intensity of rhythm put it on a par with the diametrically different Braque [no. 3], with all its good taste and sense of masterly improvisation. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

23. , German (1879-1940)

Around the Fish (1926}

Oil on canvas,183/8 x 251/8 in. (46.7 x 63.8 em.). The Museum of Modern Art. New York. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. 1939

The most important thing about Klee's art is that it embodies a new language of symbols. This is a matter rooted in the artist's own person­ ality as well as in the general historical development of art. It is a phe­ nomenon of the realms of both thought and form and as such may be traced in more or less striking manifestations throughout the most diverse branches of modern expression. It must even be recognized as a dominant factor in the modern conception of creative art. Klee's symbols are the product of both form and content, of observa­ tion and vision. There is a close relationship between the elaboration of this language of symbols and Klee's endeavor to achieve "totality in the conception of natural objects." Back in the nineteenth century the famous Swiss student of myth­ ology, Bachofen, wrote in explanation of the many meanings which

40 symbols are able to express: 'A symbol touches simultaneously all chords of the human soul. It imparts emotional awareness, while language can do no more than explain.' These words take us to the heart of Klee's conception of 'form-thinking' (Form-Denken), as he himself called it. He demands that the modern artist be capable of mul­ tiple experience and his work of multiple visual interpretation and ex­ pression. Hence the multiplicity of Klee's forms in terms of space, time, and spirit. The fusion of the individual and the general which is Klee's chief concern cannot be conveyed through form as illusion but only through form as symbol. Such symbolic forms are the very opposite of a preoc­ cupation with special or accidental forms. And Klee' s forms come to be as pluralistic in significance as the words in much modern poetry. The artist suggests; he does not define .... Klee' s still-lifes constitute a special chapter in his art. They vibrate in a tense and dreamlike detachment. In them the world of objects is not telescoped into a kind of collective unity, as in the early Cubists and Futurists, nor reduced to architectural structure or exuberant har­ mony of color and form, as in Matisse and in the post-Cubist phase of Picasso and Braque. It is rather, as in the pittura metafisica, the riddle of individual existence staring out of each object and the unexpected neighborliness of mute objects which impresses us here no less than in human life. But in Klee there is nothing of the ' inspired settings with their realistic fragments paradoxically joined together in a sort of magic realism. Instead he confronts us with a strange constellation of objects reduced to their most elementary forms and moving about like enchanted apparitions outside of all reality .... [In Around the Fish] ... a marvelously transparent water creature keeps gliding about while the plants in their container seem still to be growing, magically lit by a crescent and a full moon. A human head protrudes hauntingly from a transparent glass container. Nowhere is there a firm stand or safe repose but only a glassy, transparent lumi­ nescence in nocturnal space suggested by the crossbars of a distant window - an ultimate abbreviation corresponding in form to the exclamation point on the other side. Carola Giedion-Welcker Paul Klee

41 24. PAUL KLEE, German (1879-1940)

Cat and Bird (1928)

Oil and ink on gesso on canvas, mounted on wood, 15 x 21 in. (38.1 x 53.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Sidney Janis; and Gift of Suzy Prudden Sussman and Joan H. Meijer in memory of F. H. Hirschland, 1975 Paul Klee' s predilection for the small format picture represents the logical consequence of an imagery derived from conception rather than perception. Dealing with the imagined rather than the seen, his art was engendered from what we might call the "screen" of the mind's eye, which, by nature, feels small. Indeed, as the Gestalt psy­ chologists demonstrated long ago, this screen must be very small since it is commonly felt to be located just inside the forehead, above the eyes. These considerations are especially relevant to an understanding of Klee' s Cat and Bird, a marvelous small that is one of the Museum's most recent acquisitions. In this picture Klee relies on our awareness, perhaps subconscious, of where this "screen" is located; otherwise, we would not grasp that the bird represented in the painting is not in front of the eat's head but inside it - quite literally, on his mind. Our apprehension that the bird is a thing imagined rather than seen by the cat is reinforced by Klee' s treatment of the pupils of the eat's eyes, which appear unfocussed on any exterior object .... The conceptual nature of Cat and Bird is underscored by the fact that its two characters are shown either in absolute profile: the bird, or strict frontality; the cat. Psychologists confirm that this sort of imagery is characteristic of conceptualizing rather than observing .... Our sense of the cat' s hunger for the bird is expressed through our enforced association with the two reddish areas of the picture. As he climbs along the lines of the eat's brow, which also serve as tree branches, the bird is surrounded by a reddish glow, perhaps emanat­ ing from the sun whose disk hovers above him. This same red is picked up in the area of the eat's mouth, and again around the nose where it undergoes a slight change in hue and a considerable change in intensi­ ty. The heart shape used to denote the nose relates simultaneously to the theme of the desire of the cat for the bird and the empathy of Klee with the cat .... Many of Klee's oil paintings belong to series or groups (e.g., the Magic Squares and Egyptian Landscapes) whereas Cat and Bird is a unique image in his oeuvre as regards its handling if not its motif. "Klee' s Cat and Bird," MoMA 42 24. Paul Klee, Cat and Bird 25. PAUL KLEE, German (1879-1940)

Mask of Fear (1932)

Oil on burlap, 391/2 x 221/2 in. (100.3 x 57.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller Fund, 1978

Mask of Fear was painted in 1932, the year before Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and also the year before Klee left Germany and returned to Switzerland (where he died eight years later). Might it be a premonition of the terror to come and its psycho­ logical effect on so many innocent victims? A great oval head takes up most of the surface of the burlap which supports the pigment. A low horizontal line runs through the lower part of the face, serving as a rigid, tightly controlled mouth. Two round, blankly staring eyes flank the long, straight nose. A black arrow emerges from the top of the head (suggesting active, upward striving), and a motif of five crossed lines at the tip of a vertical aerial-like line at the back of the head may refer to balance and communication. Strangely, two pairs of legs appear below the single mask. Thus, Klee seems to suggest that individual freedom of expression is ending and that all mentally active citizens are potential enemies of the new society. Their common mask is one of fear. Like the Surrealists, Klee was concerned with exploring the uncon­ scious and utilizing automatic methods and chance effects to stimulate his creative process. Unlike the Surrealists, however, he acknowledged a greater role for the intellect, and set out to devise a visible language of abstract motifs that would be universally comprehensible - a language analogous to musical structures in their power to express subjective experience by means of pure form. Obviously, such a goal was not in complete harmony with the anti-formalist position of Breton and his friends. Edward B. Henning The Spirit of

44 26. GUSTAV KLIMT, Austrian (1862-1918)

Hope, ll (1907-08)

Oil and gilt on canvas, 431/2 x 431/2 in. (110.5 x 110.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Lauder and Helen Acheson Funds, 1978 In German, the expression guter Hoffnung is equivalent to our English euphemism "to be expecting." The literal translation of Hoffnung as "hope" thus loses an implied association with expectant motherhood, the theme of Klimt' s painting. Two radically different versions exist. The earlier and taller, painted in the summer of 1903, was acquired a decade ago by The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The pregnant woman stands starkly naked. The heavy shape of her body is emphasized by its profile facing left. Her head faces front, however, so that her stare, direct and de­ manding, confronts the viewer. The stance seems explicit, provoking, even wanton. Klimt's second version on the theme, square in format and possibly begun as early as 1907, was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art seven decades later. The mother, modest but with breasts bared, rises before us like a column, the pedestal of which is formed by a trio of maidens. She wears magnificent raiment probably of Klimt's own design. Her face as well as her figure is in full profile facing left. With downcast eyes, she bows her head, in a reverential attitude repeated by the maidens at her feet. Gently, even tentatively, the mother raises her right hand, perhaps in quiet benediction. If the first version of the theme seems profane, this second appears sacred. Silhouetted against a neutral background flecked with silver and with gold, the exaggerated verticality of the central figure's propor­ tions are complemented by the soft falling patterns of the dress and the horizontal, ovoid ornamentations embroidered on the shawl. Both garments gracefully conceal the distortions of the womb. A curious ellipse, perhaps intended to suggest a halo, appears behind the head. The adoration of the three supplicants below also suggests reverence of a sacred being. Clearly, motherhood is celebrated. The insatiable femme fatale of the Symbolists has been transformed into a resplen­ dent madonna. The son of an engraver and goldsmith, Klimt learned the skills of these trades from his father and was schooled in other handcrafts such

45 as mosaic, ceramic, enameling, and painting on glass, all of which nourished the expression of his personal, often erotic, vision. Klimt paid particular attention to details of costume .. The ma­ donna's dress is of the softest pastel patterned China silk. Her shawl, with its brighter and organic ornamentations of embroidery and appli­ que, hangs stiffer. Both garments are characteristic of the sumptuously designed textiles produced by the Wiener Werkstatte, the Viennese cooperative craft workshop that made fashionable to a wealthy and sophisticated, but essentially unaristocratic, elite. Klimt's association with the Wiener Werkstatte was seminal and continued un­ til his death in 1918. W.S.L.

27. GUSTAV KLIMT, Austrian (1862-1918)

The Park (1910 or earlier)

Oil on canvas, 431/2 x 431/2 in. (110.5 x 110.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gertrud A. Mellon Fund, 1957

In retrospect, Klimt' s art seems the last flowering of an era, and indeed his death in 1918 coincided with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Park, his first significant work to enter an American public collection, was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1957 as the gift of Gertrud A. Mellon. At that time Klimt and his art were scarcely known to an American audience, but The Park quickly be­ came one of the museum's most popular pictures. Klimt's subjects were three: allegory, landscape, and portraiture. Only the first is quin­ tessential to his vision. The landscapes, of which The Park is certainly the masterpiece, happily coincide with a current taste for sensuous surface and patterned abstraction. Klimt was accustomed to spending the summer months in the small villages along Austria's Attersee. An enthusiastic rower, he frequently moored his small boat in the lake some distance from shore so that he could obtain an uncluttered and unpeopled view of whatever scene he wished to paint. He examined these landscapes through a gridded op­ tical device. The Park can be considered as a Symbolist painting. A lush, almost hermetic, profusion of nature celebrates a season of regeneration. The

46 luxuriant tapestry of foliage descends like a curtain, its flat and densely painted surface broken only at the bottom by the upright and receding verticals of the tree trunks and, at the left, a single emerging branch. At the time of the artist's death, The Park remained in his studio. Did its blend of naturalism and schematization not appeal to his fashion­ able audience? Those same elements characterize his best commis­ sioned portraits that were so eagerly awaited. Like Hope, The Park owes much to the mural mosaics of San Vitale that Klimt had studied in Ravenna. Neither painting has yet been definitely dated. The two are exactly the same size. W.S.L.

28. , British (b. Austria) (1886-1980)

Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909)

Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 53 5/8 in. (76.5 x 136.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, 1939

"I never intended to entertain my contemporaries with the tricks of a juggler, in the hope of being recognized as an original ... I consider myself responsible, not to society, which dictates fashion and taste suited to its environment and its period, but to youth, to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the Soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life." Thus wrote Oskar Kokoschka in 1948 looking back upon his turbu­ lent career. A great European and the foremost painter in the history of Austrian art, he grew to maturity in the Vienna of Freud, Strzygowski, Schnitzler, Klimt, Mahler, whose widow encouraged him, Hoffman of the Wiener Werkstiitte where he worked as a youth, and who advised him to leave, for Vienna was also the ultra-conservative city of the aged Emperor Franz Joseph .... The double portrait of the distinguished historians of Venetian painting, Dr. and Mrs. Hans Tietze, was commissioned for an over­ mantel in their house in Vienna. Notable are the subtle relationship between the two figures, the sensitive drawing of faces and hands, the mysterious graffiti in the background. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

47 ... worthwhile to be mentioned is that it was meant as symbol of the married life of the two sitters and as such commissioned. Of certain technical interest may be that my technique at that early period was the only one to render the vision of people being alive, due to the effect of a inner light, resulting technically from layers of thinly painted col­ our and fundamentally from a creative approach, which in stressing the sense of vision, as the act of seeing, is diametrically opposed to all fashionable theories on art asserting the human being to be seen as a kind of . I know this double-portrait to be one of the best examples of my ear­ ly work if not of the whole period, how many works of artists in the last fifty years can compete with the unheard of mystery of this paint­ ing, being still an instrument of transmission of LIFE that had been lived through by the two sitters and will be excitingly life long after all of us shall be gone westwards. Oskar Kokoschka Letter to Dorothy C. Miller

29. FERNAND LEGER, French (1881-1955)

Exit the (1914)

Oil on canvas, 53 3/4 x 39 1/2 in. (136.5 x 100.3 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rubel (partly by exchange), 1958

By 1913, Leger had absorbed the lessons of Cezanne's treatment of form and color and Cubism's underlying geometrical structure, and had developed an abstract style of his own that emphasized contrasts of colors, lines, volumes, and planes. He restricted his range of colors to create greater contrasts between the forms. In the Exit the Ballets Russes, for example, he used only red, blue, green, yellow, and brown for the figures and stairway, giving his shapes firm black outlines and strong white highlights to emphasize their solidity. Leger treated the subject of the staircase in several paintings at about this date, possibly in recollection of Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase of 1911, but primarily because the theme allowed him to impart a rhythmic sense of movement in space to his articulated, geometrical forms. In this painting, human beings are transformed into robots made up of cylinders and cones, with ovoid

48 heads. Subsequently, Leger's wartime experience in the army in­ creased his admiration for the beauty of machines, and he developed a style in which both figures and objects are rendered as depersonalized, tubular forms, as in the Three Women .... The Exit the Ballets Russes was formerly owned by the famous dancer and choreographer Leonid Massine, who became a member of Diaghilev' s troupe in the same year that Leger painted the picture. Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

30. FERNAND LEGER, French (1881-1955)

The Divers, II (1941-42)

Oil on canvas, 7ft. 6 in. x 5 ft. 8 in. (228.6 x 172.8 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1955

The theme of The Divers was developed in a great many studies and paintings between 1940 and 1945. Leger himself tells us how that came about:

In 1940 I was working on my Divers in . Five or six men diving. I left for the United States and one day went to a swimming pool there. The divers were no longer five or six but two hundred at once. Just try and find yourself! Whose is that head? Whose that leg? Whose those arms? I hadn't a clue. So I scattered the limbs in my picture. I think I was far closer to the truth in that than Michelangelo was when he studied the detail of the muscles of each limb. I have seen the figures he painted in the Sistine Chapel: they don't fall, they stay put in all the corners of the buildings. One can distinguish their toenails. I assure you that when those fellows in Marseilles jumped into the water I had no time to ob­ serve the details, and my divers really fall. Leger's interest in falling bodies is surprising in view of his propensity for classical balance and calm, particularly in figure pieces. Perhaps the reason is that, after treating "objects in space," he was now at­ tracted by "figures in space." About his Divers he said: "This is a dynamic cycle that obliges me to project groups of human figures into space." They float freely without any ground-level support and almost without any difference between up and down. In this version the bodies form an inextricable tangle of limbs with a scattering of heads,

49 in which Leger "found time" to record fingernails and toenails. For, of course, what he had said about there being no time to observe details of that sort was merely a pretext to criticize Michelangelo's natural­ ism. It was not because he lacked time but, on the contrary, because he took time that he painted certain details while neglecting others for ar­ tistic reasons. That Leger's figures, unlike Michelangelo's, really fall is only a part truth and is contradicted by the fact that his pictures may be virtually turned upside down .... The figures are painted in grisaille, calling to mind the gray humanity in the pictures of about 1920. The lively interchange of light and dark has the dual task of rendering volume and movement. Strongly con­ trasted with this is the polychrome ground, composed of abstract forms painted red, yellow, blue, green, and black, without a trace of painterly shading. The contour is to these forms what the modeling is to the bodies. The drawing of the figures is dissociated from the autonomous colors ....

Werner Schmalenbach Leger

31. FERNAND LEGER, French (1881-1955)

Three Musicians, after a drawing of 1924-25, dated on canvas "24-44" (1944)

Oil on canvas, 681/2 x 571/4 in. (174 x 145.4 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1955

"The is perhaps something apart. It was based on a drawing of 1925 which I had always hoped to expand into an oil, but only found the opportunity after my arrival here in America. But even in this canvas, for all its static character, there is strength which is new. It would have been less tense and colder had it been done in France." Possibly the influence of American folk art, witty, direct and human, added to that of the Douanier Rousseau, partly accounts for this painting of three hall figures, so solidly welded into a group that instruments, arms and heads resemble a single interrelated form. One feels that nothing should be added, nothing removed. Each necktie, hat and lapel plays a double role - first to characterize the musician, second to integrate the design. Leger has always been attracted by pop-

50 31. Fernand Leger, Three Musicians ular places of entertainment, finding excellent raw material for his paintings in burlesque shows, dance halls, and circuses. In this connec­ tion he says, "I did not frequent popular dance halls and the people's quarter out of snobbism. I used to go there because I had a real liking for the fellows and girls of the district .... The fifteen-cent burlesque shows of Chicago still offer material. It is only for the artist to select. ..." Katharine Kuh Leger

32. RENE MAGRITTE, Belgian (1898-1967)

The Menaced Assassin (1926)

Oil on canvas, 4ft. 111/4 in. x 6ft. 4 7/8 in. (150.4 x 195.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kay Sage Tanguy Fund, 1966

Magritte's paintings question the validity of our primary means of communication, as well as our sensory perceptions of a disorderly and contradictory world. He wrote: "That pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial inspired in me belief in an infinity of possi­ bilities now unknown to life. I know that I am not alone in affirming that their conquest is the only valid end and reason for the existence of man." [From a letter to James Thrall Soby, quoted in Pamela Pritzker, Magritte (New York: Leon Amiel, n.d.), p. 8] One of Magritte's early Surrealist paintings, The Menaced Assassin, is possibly an oblique homage to the heroic criminal so much admired by the Surrealists - the free man who contemptuously defies the morality and laws ostensibly made for the protection of vested inter­ ests and of the weak. Among such Surrealist heroes are de Sade, Lautreamont' s Maldoror, Rim baud, and the fictional, modern French Robin Hood, Fantomas. (Louis Feuillade filmed a serial based on the exploits of Fantomas, who stalked the streets of Paris outwitting the police and whose identity remained secret.) Magritte' s The Menaced Assassin calls to mind an outrageous Fanto­ mas-like crime. The nude body of a young woman, presumably mur­ dered, lies on a couch in an open room. Blood coagulates in the corner of her mouth. A young man - apparently the killer - stands noncha­ lantly listening to a gramaphone. Two men stand outside the room

52 32. Rene Magritte, The Menaced Assassin hidden from the assassin's sight, one on either side of an archway; one holds a club, the other a net. Three male heads appear above the balcony railing, blocking the only other exit from the room. In the distance, a mountain shaped like a breast rises against the sky. Thus, the observer views the scene as though he were a spectator at a drama. He is outside the room looking into the two rooms and be­ yond into distant space, but his gaze is directed back into the room by the three faces outside the balcony peering in. All faces are expression­ less; no emotion is betrayed in this scene of a terrible crime. The threatened criminal appears to be a handsome and gentle young man who enjoys music. The odds against him are overwhelming, yet he is apparently oblivious to the threat. In this work Magritte has shocked the sensibilities of his audience, arousing its sympathies for the mon­ ster, and causing it to question values that it held to be self-evident. Edward B. Henning The Spirit of Surrealism

33. KASIMIR MALEVICH, Russian (1878-1935)

Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918)

Oil on canvas, 311/4 x 311/4 in. (79.4 x 79.4 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935

Abstract art in Russia began long before the Revolution of 1917. The succession of artistic movements of the years 1917-1922 was merely a continuation of the previous five years' excitement in which Cubism, Rayonism, Suprematism, Non-Objectivism, Cuba-, and Con­ structivism had been born and, in some cases, had died. The Suprema­ tist-Non-Objectivist movement was by far the most important develop­ ment for Russian abstract painting. It was inevitable that the impulse toward pure abstraction should have been carried to an absolute conclusion sooner or later.... The first artist to establish a system of absolutely pure geometrical abstract composition was the Russo-Polish painter Kasimir Malevich of Moscow .... In the history of abstract art Malevich is a figure of fundamental importance. As a pioneer, a theorist, and an artist he influenced not only a large following in Russia but also, through Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, the course of abstract art in Central Europe. He stands at

54 the heart of the movement which swept westward from Russia after World War I and, mingling with the eastward moving influence of the Dutch de Stijl group, transformed the architecture, furniture, typog­ raphy, and commercial art of Germany and much of the rest of Europe. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Modern Masters

The plane, forming a square, was the source of Suprematism, new color realism, as non-objective creation .... Suprematism arose in Moscow in 1913 and its first works were at an exhibition of paintings in Petrograd where they aroused indignation in the then venerable newspapers and critics, as well as amongst profes­ sional people - the masters of painting. Mentioning non-objectivity I only wanted to point out clearly that in Suprematism things, objects etc. are not treated- and that is all; non­ objectivity in general has nothing to do with it. Suprematism is a defi­ nite system by which the movement of color passed along the long path of its culture .... The blue color of the sky has been defeated by the Suprematist sys­ tem, has been broken through, and entered white, as the true real conception of infinity, and therefore liberated from the color back­ ground of the sky. The system, hard, cold and unsmiling, is brought into motion by philosophical thought, or else within the system its real strength is already moving .... I am only free when my will, on a critical and philosophical basis, can bring from what already exists the basis for new phenomena. I have torn through the blue lampshade of color limitations, and come out into the white; after me, comrade aviators sail into the chasm - I have set up semaphores of Suprematism. I have conquered the lining of the heavenly, have torn it down and, making a bag, put in colors and tied it with a knot. Sail forth! The white, free chasrn, infinity is before us.

Kasimir Malevich "Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism," Essays on Art 1915-1933

55 34. , French (1869-1954)

Woman on a High Stool (1914)

Oil on canvas, 57 7/8 x 37 5/8 in. (147 x 95.5 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Given anonymously, donor retaining life interest, 1964

In the gray cold of a Parisian winter, Matisse painted this austere, sim­ plified figure which is diametrically opposed to the colorful, sensuous freedom of his earlier pictures. Warmth and hedonism have been re­ placed by a rigorous linear style and sober gray, near-monochrome palette. Strong line defines the massive columnar weight of the figure, tapering from heavy stool to solid, slightly rounded body to oval head on a straight neck. An equally heavy but less expressive line is used to describe the other two objects. The composition is reduced to a mini­ mum; not an extraneous detail mars the ascetic restraint. The vase painting on the wall, by Matisse's then teen-aged son, Pierre, repeats the figure, in a symmetrical placement as well as in form. (Woman on a High Stool served a similar function two years later in the great Piano Lesson... [no. 35].) A brief transition between the strict verticality of these two elements and the table's horizontal is effected by the sheet of paper which acts as a diagonal repoussoir and in turn duplicates the angle at which the stool is set. Lucy R. Lippard Modern Masters

Matisse's ... the Woman on a High Stool done in the winter of 1913- 1914, could scarcely have been less charming and voluptuous. Ger­ maine Raynal posed for the rigid, powerfully drawn figure, perched on the heavy stool. Behind her is a table of Spartan design; on it is a single sheet of white paper, and above on the wall is a drawing by Pierre Matisse .... Except for a few touches of reluctant color, all these austere forms exist in grey monochrome. Yet though its asceticism is so forbid­ ding as to make one smile at first, the Woman on a High Stool remains one of Matisse's most compelling images.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public

56 35. HENRI MATISSE, French (1869-1954)

Piano Lesson (1 916)

Oil on canvas, 8ft. 1/2 in. x 6ft. 113/4 in. (245.1 x 212.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1946

During the years 1914 and 1916 Matisse was seriously depressed by the World War and at the same time, on another plane, preoccupied with cubism which previously he had largely ignored. These factors more or less affected his painting, which passed through a time of disci­ plined sobriety both in color and structure.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Unpublished notes

The very large Piano Lesson was painted by Matisse in the living room of his villa at Issy [-les-Moulineaux]. The artist's son Pierre sits barri­ caded behind the PleyeL Looking down on him from the wall above, as if in surveillance, is a greatly elongated version of a painting of 1914, the Woman on a High Stool [no. 34]. At the left the big window with open casements looks on the garden, with its triangle of green foliage. In the lower left-hand corner stands the artist's bronze Decorative Figure of 1906. Unfortunately Matisse [could not] remember whether the Piano Les­ son was painted before or after the equally large but very different ver­ sion of a similar subject, the Music Lesson [collection Barnes Founda­ tion, Merion, Pennsylvania]. Pierre Matisse however is quite sure that this is the earlier of the two and was painted in the fall of 1916, revers­ ing Matisse's usual procedure of working from realistic to abstract, a sequence previously demonstrated by [his] pairs of "before-and-after" canvases. The new sequence indicates the changing course of Matisse's art at this time. Few compositions by Matisse have been more rigorously simplified and geometrized than the Piano Lesson. The pervasive grey back­ ground may well have been suggested by the grey Woman on a High Stool and, the monochrome of walls and floor is here carried even out of doors in a single great plane broken by carefully selected and isolated incidents. The composition is centrifugal with the center passive and almost empty. The vertical green wedge of the garden at the upper left balances the complementary pink of the horizontal

f57 piano top, lower right; and the dull blue painted female figure, clothed and Gothicly rigid in the upper right-hand corner, wittily complements the dull brown sculptured female figure, nude and relaxed, at the lower left. These figures, human and geometrical, are framed or linked by a scaffolding of blue and black bars. The painting is full of other subtle analogies and entertaining polarities. Besides the two intricately contrasted female figures, the big triangle of green, as it echoes and ex­ pands the small foreground triangle of the metronome, may be noted; and also the play between the black arabesques of music rack and window grill. The sharp converging points of green, black, pink and grey provide a valuable moment of excitement in an otherwise disciplined calm, just as the vigorously pyramidal metronome disturbs the general flatness of the rest of the picture. There are some cubist vestiges in the Piano Lesson but no cubist ever surpassed the beautiful divisions, the grave and tranquil elegance of this big picture. Nor did Matisse himself. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public

36. HENRI MATISSE, French (1869-1954}

The Rose Marble Table (1917)

Oil on canvas, 571/2 in. x 381/4 in. (146 x 97 ern.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1956

In 1952, as a dedication to a friend, Matisse inscribed the following three sentences in a copy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s definitive Matisse: His Art and His Public published the previous year by The Museum of Modern Art: "I work as hard as I can and as well as I can all day long. I work to my full capacity with all my ability. And then, if what I have done is not good, I am no longer responsible. It is simply that I really cannot do better."

The Rose Marble Table, with its subtle, almost melancholy harmonies .... was painted at Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris in 1917 not long before Matisse made his first trip to in order to escape the melan­ choly of wartime Paris. The sobriety of the color is common to many of Matisse's wartime canvases, but nowhere else does he use this subtle combination of pink and green on dark brown. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Summer 1957 58 35. Henri Matisse, Piano Lesson The Rose Marble Table, the most remarkable still life of 1917, resembles in its centralizing of a single major form the imposing Oranges [Collec­ tion of The ] and Apples [private collection, Paris] of the previous year. Actually it is much larger but done softly with a muted palette and a romantic gloom as if painted at dusk. Although they are somewhat overwhelmed by the big compositions and interiors of 1916-17, the stilllifes of this period are among the most original and powerful in Matisse's career. They are not so complex or daring in color as the great series of 1908-1910, nor so sparkling as the flower pieces of 1919, nor so sumptuous as the table-scapes of 1924, but for sober dignity and grandeur of scale - not size - they are unsurpassed in the work of Matisse or, for that matter, any of his contemporaries. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public

37. JOAN MIRO, Spanish (1893-

Dutch Interior, I (1928)

Oil on canvas, 361/8 x 28 3/4 in. (91.8 x 73 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1945

On a visit to Holland in 1928, Mir6 was attracted by genre paintings [on the] theme [of an interior with figures] as rendered by the seventeenth-century Dutch "Little Masters" and brought back a number of postcards of their works. The Dutch Interior, I is the first of three compositions in which he freely adapted pictures of this type. Sorgh's Lute Player, which formed the basis for the [Museum of Modern Art's] painting, shows a swain with brimmed hat seated with crossed legs, playing his lute to a lady who leans with one elbow resting upon a table laid with a cloth, fruit bowl, wine glass, and dish. In the foreground are a cat and a dog; at the left, a window opens out onto a view of Amsterdam. A painting hangs on the rear wall, with the narrow arches of interior windows above it. All these details have been completely transformed in Mir6's gay, brightly colored interior. In spite of the indications of space given by the wall, ceiling, and floor and the three-dimensionality of the window embrasure, the room, together with the figures and objects it contains,

60 37. Joan Mir6, Dutch Interior, I is essentially flat. Ribbonlike arabesques, wholly arbitrary patches of color, and patterning in areas of black and white take the place of modeling. In addition to his metamorphosis. of the individual components in Sorgh's painting, Mir6 altered the everyday atmo­ sphere of his prototype and turned it into fantasy by introducing a number of elements of his own invention, such as the footprint at the right, the bat flying above, and the bird swooping down from the ceiling. Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

38. JOAN MIRO, Spanish (1893-

Mural Painting (1950-51)

Oil on canvas, 6ft. 2 3/4 in. x 19ft. 5 3/4 in. (189.8 x 593.8 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1963

Except for the lost Reaper, made for a stairway landing of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937, it was only after World War II that Mir6 had the occasion to execute wall-size paintings .... in 1950, at the suggestion of architect Walter Gropius, com­ missioned the mural, now at The Museum of Modern Art, for the Harkness Commons building of the graduate center .... In making this large mural, Mir6 wrote that he "wanted to work with the plastic rigor and the elan of the great Romanesque frescoes of our Barcelona museum." [Questionnaire in the files of Museum of Mod­ ern Art dated March 16, 1964]. But, while Mir6 equaled the simplicity and stunning decorative power of those medieval frescoes in Mural Painting, he made no attempt to assimilate their particular qualities of design and color. Indeed, the color and drawing of many Mir6 paint­ ings of the twenties are closer to the Romanesque than is Mural Paint­ ing .... Against a soft and atmospheric ground of subtly shifting hues, figures are contoured in black; some of these are filled in with patterns in opaque flat colors-usually the primaries-or black; others remain "transparent," the ground colors showing through. Mir6 alluded to this when he wrote the Museum [of Modern Art] in March 1964 [ibid.] that Mural Painting was "highly representative," a "capital work [which] summed up all my research." ...

62 The hypothesis that the unifying link in the motifs is the bullfight [this reading was suggested by Margit Rowell of the Guggenheim Museum] is, however, an attractive one. Aside from the bull, whose front-view eyes (and rear-view tail and genitals) are superimposed on his profile silhouette, there are three other motifs. Two, which frame the scene, are clearly human figures. The third, between the bull and the figure on the left, is a configuration that may or may not be a head. [James Thrall Soby, Joan Mir6 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 126, speaks of "the protruding head at the left of the sketch."] Interpreted in terms of the bullfight hypothesis, the figure on the right, whose left hand holds a muleta, becomes a matador. The figure on the left becomes a banderillero - a surmise supported by his running posture, his raised arms, and by the tassled sombrero he wears in the preparatory sketch ... The "head" between the banderillero and the bull can be read as a rear view of the picador's horse, the configura­ tions of whose tail and sex echo the same motifs in the bull. His protec­ tive coat is indicated by the black band that parallels the lower edge of the picture field. William Rubin Mirc5 in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art

39. , Italian (1884-1920)

Reclining Nude (c. 1919)

Oil on canvas, 281/2 x 45 7/8 in. (72.4 x 116.5 ern.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1950

Unlike most painters of his generation in Paris, Modigliani was chiefly concerned with the variable character of the human face and form. Modigliani was a facile painter, intuitively lyric and elegant. The pictures by which he is known to the general public were painted dur­ ing five brief years, 1915 to 1919. They constitute a production limited in time, subject, and style. He is not an artist who can easly sustain a large or comprehensive exhibition. His nudes, his greatest accomplish­ ments, clearly reveal him as an Italian painter. Their attitudes suggest Titian. Their clarity of contour and lustrous form recall the sculptural paintings of Bronzino. The elongation, indeed deformation, of the body echoes Pontormo. Modigliani also employs the Mannerists'

63 device of dark backgrounds to silhouette the figure. Indeed, in Modigliani' s nudes the artistic individuality of the Mannerists finds its heritage. Such Italianate painting had not been produced in France since the School of Fontainebleau. Modigliani began his series of great nudes in 1917. The format of several - about a dozen - offers the only horizontal images in Modigliani' s entire oeuvre. The complete human figure is seldom rendered; hands, particularly fingers, always presented problems, and Modigliani never attempted to depict feet. Despite the sophistication of rendition, these models completely lack self-consciousness. They are splendidly voluptuous and often unabashed. The flesh tones vary and the colors, although monotonous, are warm and seductive. Perhaps Modigliani' s last figure painting, it was distinguished, apparently by the artist himself, with the title "Le Grand Nu." In no other painting of his - indeed in few canvases of our century - are sensuality and classic serenity held in such superb balance. Like Seurat, Modigliani died young. In the case of both painters one must ask how much further their development could have progressed. And in the case of Modigliani, as with van Gogh, the romance of the artist's life conspired to lend passion to his actual achievement. Like Picasso, Modigliani conceived the artist to be a superior being, and he lived and died by this belief. The painting, formerly in the collection of the great film director, , was sold upon his death at an auction in New York in 1949 when it was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. W.S.L. Modern Masters

40. LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY, American (b. Hungary) (1895-1946)

Z II (1925)

Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 x 295/8 in. (95.4 x 75.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 1956

Certain of [Moholy-Nagy's] paintings, particularly those of the early twenties, must be counted among [his] finest accomplishments. The influence, first of the Cubists, the Futurists, and the Dadaists and then of Malevich and Lissitzky, is certainly patent, but Moholy displays a

64 40. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Z ll breathtaking authority in assimilating these influences and a perfect understanding of their significance. Indeed, in the genre of pure geometrical abstraction, I would place Moholy' s paintings of the early twenties above those of Kandinsky. Yet Moholy clearly regarded such easel painting as a marginal activity, perhaps even an obsolete activity, which unfortunate circum­ stances still required him to pursue. The dream he harbored was for a kind of art that could not be contained by the easel, the studio, or the museum. Nowadays, I suppose, we would call it environmental art, though Moholy' s dream cannot really be understood in purely aes­ thetic terms. What he envisioned was a grandiose form of social recon­ struction- a benevolent revolution in which the resources of industri­ al technology would be used to liberate and elevate the sensibility of the masses. The role of the artistic impulse in such a revolution would not be to produce precious objects (such as easel paintings), but tore­ design every object- indeed, every visual sensation- in the environ­ ment. Art would cease to be an end in itself and become a method - the primary method, in fact- for transforming society into a happier and more harmonious community. Hilton Kramer The Age of the A vant-Garde

In a letter to his friend Kalivoda, Moholy-Nagy tried to rationalize his continued preoccupation with easel painting, although he had been the most eloquent prophet of a new age in which paint and brushes would be discarded, museums would be closed, and everyone would participate in "painting with light" by technological means on clouds, reflecting and warped surfaces, photographic emulsion, and architec­ tural volumes. Blaming reactionary industry and profit-greedy mass­ media for blocking experimentation, and so depriving the masses of "direct contact with the new forces of artistic creation," he concluded: Since it is impossible at present to realize our dreams of the fullest de­ velopment of optical techniques [light architecture), we are forced to retain the medium of easel painting. [June 1934; published in Telehor, Brno, 1936] To the historian the simultaneity of traditional and innovative visual means seems as natural and inevitable as the coexistence of books and television, ships and space rockets, scholars and computers. Easel

66 painting will always remain the catalyst that precipitates visual changes while remaining constant in its basic conception and func­ tion. As long as man builds walls there will be painting, just as long as there will be individual sculpture as long as man designs spaces. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

41. , French (1840-1926)

The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920-22)

Oil on canvas, 351/4 x 457/8 in. (89.5 x 116.3 em.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Grace Rainey Rogers Fund, 1956

No other landscape motif (except, perhaps, Cezanne's Mont Sainte­ Victoire) has been subject to so close a scrutiny, has been the setting for such a range of subjective experience, or has been the source of so rich a harvest of art works as Monet's water garden. In 1890, after the purchase of the farmhouse in which he lived at Giverny, he acquired a tract of flood land that lay across the road and the one-track railroad from his front gateway. On it grew some poplars, and a tiny branch of the Epte River provided a natural boundary. Excavation was im­ mediately begun to result, aft'er several enlargements of the plan, in a 100 by 300 foot pond through which the flow of water from the river was controlled by a sluice at either end. Curvilinear and organic in shape, it narrowed at the western end to pass beneath a Japanese footbridge .... The twenty-seven-year period of water landscapes begins with the series of the Japanese footbridge exhibited in 1900. It was on this bridge that Monet stood to meditate and watch the lily blossoms open in the forenoon and close late in the day. Yet, because of the surround­ ing screen of vegetation, the effect of light is not cyclical. The first impact of these works is of an almost tropical profusion of trees, shrubs, festoons of weeping willow, and iris beds; its exotic abundance, dramatized by florid accents, is akin to the extravagant literary descriptions of Monet's friend Octave Mirbeau or the atonal music of Debussy and Stravinsky. Upon the saturated greens, blues, siennas, and ochres of the pool and its wavering reflections, the lily

67 pads and blossoms, viewed in recession, lie like a rich but tattered carpet worked with threads of pink and white. William C. Seitz Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments

This extraordinary and emotional study belongs to a group that is among the most problematical of Monet's career. At first glance it could be mistaken for an expressionistic abstraction painted after 1950; it seems totally without recognizable subject matter, and its florid color and impassioned brushwork typify contemporary style more than they do Impressionism. Only comparison with earlier works, or with photographs, will demonstrate that Monet has once again worked before a familiar motif: the passerelle japonaise (Japanese footbridge) at the downstream end of his water garden. At its left is the bank, and at its right hang festoons of willow. Once identified, the image at first suggests an extreme close-up view, like those of 1899-1900, until it is noted that bridge and handrail are complete in the lower arch, and that the upper arch represents a trellis, hanging with wisteria, that had not been built when Monet painted the first canvases from the same spot. ... Monet had employed extremes of color and execution in the past, but to translate qualities already present in his motifs. In 1922, for the first and only time - and at the most tragically subjective moment of both his physical and spiritual life- he re-formed nature according to inner anguish and the distorted vision that he resented, to produce his only truly expressionistic works. After the operation on one eye, in February, Monet's first sensation was one of a permeating blueness, and on returning home he was astonished by the odd coloration of his most recent pictures. With normal sight partially restored, he was back at work by the fall of 1923.

William C. Seitz Claude Monet

68 42. , Norwegian (1863-1944)

The Storm (1893)

Oil on canvas. 361/8 x 511/2 in.(91.8 x 130.8 em.). The Museum of Modern Art. New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. lrgens Larsen and Purchased through the Lillie P. Bliss and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds. 1974

It is difficult to place the solitary figure of Edvard Munch in any summary of modern art. The foremost artist Scandinavia has pro­ duced, he was a contemporary of the Post-Impressionists in France and the senior of Bonnard and Vuillard, but he worked far into the twentieth century and died in 1944. Also, more than any other single artist, he is the father of in Germany. The fact that Munch's work is literary needs no defense. More interested in content than in the solution of aesthetic problems, he possessed an imagination fevered by deep personal reactions to the world around him. He has been compared to Redon in France and En­ sor in Belgium. But Redon' s visions were dreams, not nightmares, and the grotesque fantasy of Ensor remains essentially Flemish. Munch's revelations were cultivated by passion, with terror and, perhaps like Baudelaire's, with delight. "I paint not what I see, but what I saw," Munch wrote. "The camera cannot compete with painting since it cannot be used in Heaven or Hell." W.S.L. Modern Masters

The motif is taken from Asgardstrand with the Ki0sterud building in the background, well known from many of Munch's pictures. Accord­ ing to Jens Thiis, the motif was inspired by the experience of a strong storm there. The storm is, however, depicted more as a psychic than a physical reality. The nervous, sophisticated brushstrokes, the somber colors, and the agitated nature are brought into harmony, rendering the impression of anxiety and turbulent psychological conflicts. The Storm is also a reflection of Munch's interest in the landscapes of Arnold Bocklin. As in the painting Evening on Karl Johan Street [col­ lection Rasmus Meyers, ], the illuminated windows function as an important pictorial element. The eye is drawn toward them; in a strange way, they radiate psychic life. Munch emphasized controlling the effects rendered by the illuminated windows. He has scraped out

69 the paint around the yellow areas to achieve the maximum effect. It is as though the house becomes a living organism with yellow eyes, creating contact with the surroundings. In front of the house, a group of women stands huddled together, all with their hands up against their heads like the foreground figure in the painting The Scream. Iso­ lated from the group, closer to the center, stands a lonely woman, also with her hands against her head. Like the foreground figure in The Scream, she represents anxiety and violent spiritual conflicts. The mood and charged atmosphere indicate that the object of the anxiety is an erotic urge. In the summer months Asgardstrand was visited by a great number of women, since most of the summer guests consisted of families whose men worked during the week in Christiania. By now, Munch had formulated an aesthetic which dictated that in his most im­ portant motifs, he should represent pictures of recollection as well as the artist's psychological reactions to them. He also made a small woodcut of this motif. Arne Eggum "Major Paintings," in Edvard Munch

43. , French (1840-1916)

Silence (c. 1911)

Oil on gesso on paper, 211/4 x 211/2 in. (54 x 54.6 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Painted in monochromatic browns within an oval frame and set against a pale green background, this somber figure with hooded eyes has a secretive, otherworldly aspect. The picture's mood of melan­ choly reverie relates it to the literature of the Symbolists, with whom Redon was closely associated. The thin oil wash used as a medium contributes to the evanescent effect. This is an evocative image and, at the same time, with its gesture of upraised fingers sealing the lips, a quite literal representation of si­ lence. It is not only more explicit than many of Redon' s paintings and prints but is also related to other renditions of the subject in Western art. Among the specific sources almost certainly known to Redon are Fra Angelico's fresco in the cloister of San Marco in , showing St. Peter Martyr holding a finger to his lips to enjoin silence, and a

70 marble relief known as Le Silence, by the nineteenth-century French sculptor Auguste Pr(mult, on a tomb in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The relief shows the same gesture as the figure in Redon's painting and encloses the head in a similar way within an oval frame against a rectangular background. Redon treated the subject of silence in several other works. Closest to this picture is a mural done at about the same time (1910-1911) as a decoration over the doorway to the library of his friend Gustave Fayet, occupying what had formerly been the cloister of the abandoned abbey of Fontfroide. These and other connections with the painting in The Museum of Modern Art have been discussed by Theodore Reff; he identifies the features as those of the artist's wife and suggests that, as she had recently been extremely ill, the Silence may be a personal expression of Redon's profound sadness and sense of the closeness of death. Helen M. Franc An Invitation to See

44. , French (1844-1910)

The Sleeping Gypsy (1897)

Oil on canvas, 4ft. 3 in. x 6ft. 7 in. (129.5 x 200.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, 1939

Rousseau himself so esteemed [The Sleeping Gypsy] that he offered it to Laval, his native town: "Monsieur le Maire: I have the honor of sending you these few lines as a compatriot of yours who has become a self-taught artist and is desirous that his native city possess one of his works, proposing that you purchase from me a genre painting called The Sleeping Gypsy which measures 2.60 in width by 1.90 meters in height [including frame ... ]. A wandering Negress, playing the mandolin, with her jar beside her (vase containing drinking water) sleeps deeply, worn out by fatigue. A lion wanders by, detects her and doesn't devour her. There's an effect of moonlight, very poetic. The scene takes place in a completely arid desert. The Gypsy is dressed in Oriental fashion. "I will let it go for 2,000 to 1,800 francs because I would be happy that the city of Laval possess a remembrance of one of its children.

71 "In the hope that my offer will be treated with favor, accept, Monsieur le Maire, the assurance of my distinguished consideration." The Mayor referred Rousseau's offer to the Laval Museum but the picture itself disappeared for twenty years so that the cubist generation who came to admire Rousseau in his last years knew nothing of La bohemienne endorrnie. Shortly after the armistice of 1918 the picture reappeared. At that time Pierre Roche was acting as agent for the great New York collector, John Quinn. Roche [reminisced] in a ... letter: "The Sleeping Gypsy was pointed out to me by Picasso as something for Quinn - it had just arrived at Kahnweiler' s ... I mailed a photo of it to Quinn and every day, almost, for a whole week, sent him a cable giving the exact opinions, for or against, of artists I had got to look at the picture ... So, by the time Quinn got my letter he had already received 6 cables on the subject. He replied 'No money; buy nothing.' Nevertheless, he bought it right away and it was one of two or three pictures he had before his eyes upon his deathbed [in 1925].'' Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

45. HENRI ROUSSEAU, French (1844-1910) The Dream (1910)

Oil on canvas, 6ft. 81/2 in. x 9 ft. 91/2 in. (204.5 x 298.5 em.}, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1954

Yadwigha in a lovely dream, Having most sweetly gone to sleep, Heard the snake-charmer blow his flute, Breathing his meditation deep. While on the streams and verdant trees Gleam the reflections of the moon, And savage serpents lend their ears To the gay measures of the tune.

These verses (translated ... by Bertha Ten Eyck James) [D.C. Rich, Henri Rousseau, Museum of Modern Art monograph, 2nd ed. (New York: 1946)] were written by Rousseau and attached to his great can­ vas The Dream when he exhibited it at the Salon des Independants of

72 45. Henri Rousseau, The Dream 1910. On March 11th, a few days before the Salon opened, Rousseau wrote his friend and champion Guillaume Apollinaire: "I have sent my large picture- everybody likes it- I think you will deploy your liter­ ary talents and will avenge me for all insults and affronts received. I know, through Picasso, that it is in L'Intransigeant that you do art criti­ cism.'' Another critic, Andre Dupont, asked Rousseau why he put the couch in the jungle. Rousseau wrote him, April 1: "Cher Monsieur: I reply immediately to your kind letter in order to explain to you the reason for the whereabouts of the said couch in question. This woman asleep on the couch dreams that she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds of the enchanter's instrument. This is the reason the couch is in the picture."... Ambroise Vollard, who bought The Dream, recalls in his Souvenirs d'un marchand de tableaux a conversation with Rousseau about his great picture: "Tell me, M. Rousseau, how did you make so much air circulate among the trees and the moonlight look so real?" "By studying nature, M. Vollard," replied the painter. Thirty years later an American museum director [Daniel Catton Rich] wrote: "The Dream is a summation of all those qualities which make Rousseau inimitable. Its organization of spaces and complex tones (an artist counted over fifty variations of green alone) is equaled by its sentiment. The plane of reality (the figure on the sofa) is inventively joined to the plane of the dream (the jungle). In it appears, in heightened form, every symbol of the last ten years of Rousseau's life, redesigned and related with a free intensity. The nude figure surrounded by enormous lilies is one of Rousseau's most perfect realizations, while the leopards peering from the jungle leaves are full of his expressive mystery." Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

74 46. OSKAR SCHLEMMER, German (1888-1943)

Bauhaus Stairway (1932)

Oil on canvas, 63 7/8 x 45 in. (162.3 x 114.3 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of , 1942

In the spring of 1919 and in the vortex of Germany's economic and social revolution, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar, the capital· of the new and doomed republic. In the prospectus for his school, the architect Walter Gropius summoned an ideal and so­ cialistic community. Painters, sculptors, and architects as well as masters of all handcrafts were to join and work together. In proximity and by exchange, they would stimulate and share the creative spirit that illumined their respective artistic disciplines. And, they would teach the young. The Bauhaus's first years in Weimar were its freest, with each artist joining the faculty contributing to the method and curriculum of the school. Moholy-Nagy (no. 40), for instance, introduced new media ex­ ploiting light and kinetic movement. Schlemmer turned theater into a mechanical spectacle preserving, nevertheless, the image of man as a pivotal and humanist symbol. In addition, essential teachers such as Feininger (no. 1 9) and Klee (nos. 23-25) found in the Bauhaus a compatible environment and one that allowed them to pursue their individual careers. Although from its founding a target of political attack, the government-supported Bauhaus grew in size and scope, and its influence became international. In 1925, after the school moved to Dessau and into its new quarters designed by Gropius, the curriculum underwent expedient changes. An apprentice system was abandoned, and handicraft, even the manufacture of toys, became oriented to industrial mass production. The Bauhaus lost some of its initial revolutionary fervor. By the end of its brief fourteen years of existence, however, the school and its community had exceeded Gropius's original vision. In architecture and typography, and in furniture and design (rather than in painting and sculpture), the Bauhaus established both a concept and a style that have had continuing influence on modern life .... Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway of 1932 offers an idealized and romantic recollection of the school from which he had resigned three

75 years before. Significantly, it also summarizes the development of his own art during the 1920s. In late February of 1933, soon after the painting had been completed, it was featured in an exhibition of his work that opened in his native Stuttgart. Ten days later, the Nazis assumed control of the city. Schlemmer's exhibition was closed on the charge of "art bolshevism," and he was dismissed from his new teaching post. In Dessau the previous year, the Bauhaus had already been forced to close its doors. "It is a shame," Schlemmer wrote, "that the cultural world neither protested nor lodged any appeal. Apparently, we are so unnerved and so tractable that all this can happen." Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway became his own protest, his own affirmation, and his pictorial manifesto. Soon after the abrupt closing of his exhibition in 1933, Schlemmer was relieved that Philip Johnson, today the celebrated American architect, had acquired his painting. In a letter to Johnson, his junior by some eighteen years, Schlemmer described it as "perhaps my best." Schlemmer lived and died believing that what he painted was not fictive, that what he created was indeed a continuation of, and as real as, architectural space. In his painting, and in contrast to his theater, persons are never individualized. In his Bauhaus Stairway, youths un­ troubled and idealized move through a transparent lucid architecture that in fact had been built for the school in Dessau. Figures of two stu­ dents are cut by the sides of the picture's frame. They lead the spec­ tator, however, into the composition as they join their colleagues mounting Gropius's grand stairwell. At the top left and in front of a glass wall, a seemingly suspended figure - perhaps a dancer - stops on a landing and faces front. The frozen pose breaks the upward thrust of the bannister and balances the ascending rhythmic move­ ment on the stairs. In size, form, and color Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway may be compared to Leger's earlier Exit, the Ballets Russes (No. 29). W.S.L.

76 46. Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway 47. GEORGES-PIERRE SEURAT, French (1859-1891}

Evening, Honfleur (1886)

Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 32 in. (65.4 x 81.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy, 1957

Seurat's Honfleur seascapes of summer 1886 were his first major group of paintings begun after he had reworked the Grande fatte, and they are more consistently worked over in small separate 'points' of paint than any of his previous paintings; but their execution is by no means uniform. In Honfleur, Evening the small dots are added over broader strokes of paint, and only in some parts of the painting - in areas of sea, beach and sky- where they are used to make one color stand out against another, to animate this particular zone of the picture. Even in these areas they remain large enough to be felt as separate touches when the painting is seen from a normal viewing distance; defined this c. 1889 as three times the length of the painting's diagonal ... Elsewhere in the picture, where a more uniform color effect is sought, the touches are softer and rather larger, and closely related tints are allowed to blend together on the canvas. There are delicate variations of color throughout the picture, and the dominant colors of each area are softly echoed across the rest of the canvas. It is very possible that the 'points' were added, in part at least, in Seurat's studio in Paris. Shortly before leaving Honfleur, he described the picture as 'not yet satisfactory' [Seurat to Signac, quoted in H. Dorra and J. Rewald, Seurat, l'oeuvre peint, biographie et catalogue raisonne (Paris: 1959), p. 155] and he did not exhibit it until the fol­ lowing year, though a less highly worked Honfleur canvas appeared in the 1866 Independants exhibition which opened in August, very soon after his return to Paris. The painted frame was added later; Seurat seems to have begun to make these during 1887 .... Its dominant colors contrast with the adjacent areas of the painting. In spring 1886 Seurat had met Charles Henry, and had learned of his theories about the emotive power of line -lines moving upwards and to the right expressing gaiety, downward and to the left expressing . The Honfleur seascapes show tauter linear structures than his previous paintings, but Honfleur, Evening does not reflect Henry's views in any explicit way; the recurrent verticals (which can be read as upward- or downward-moving) give the painting an equilibrium, and

78 it was a soothing stillness which Huysmans found in the Honfleur paintings when he reviewed them in 1887. The only study for this picture [H. Dorra and J. Rewald, 1959, p. 170] confirms Seurat's interest in line and silhouette; it focuses on the contrast between two posts of the breakwater and the rock at bottom right. John House Post-Impressionism

48. GEORGES-PIERRE SEURA T, French (1859-1891)

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor (1888)

Oil on canvas, 215/8 x 25 5/8 in. (54.9 x 65.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

This restful view is a kind of watery maze with boats circling around the breakwaters in the heat of a bright summer day. The canvas is divided into two compartments. A fairly heavy triangular strip of land forms the foreground, while above it dynamic bands of light suggest the breeze swelling the sails and sweeping the sea over which sailboats are gliding in every direction. In this limpid work Seurat is especially effective at evoking boats moving toward the hgrizon. This endows the painting with infinite depth in space. According to Cesar de Hauke, Seurat exhibited this work in 1888 under the title The Jetties at Port-en-Bessin. Exhibiting it again the fol­ lowing year, he gave it the title by which it is known today [Fishing Fleet at Port-en-Bessin]. After Seurat's death, however, his family ex­ hibited it twice under the title Port-en-Bessin, The Outer Harbor at High Tide, which is actually the title of another painting, now in The Louvre. In Transformations, Roger Fry points out the surprising beauty of the shadows the clouds cast on the sea, forming a subtle arabesque whose fluidity is further accentuated by the patterns of vegetation in the foreground. Pierre Courthion

79 [John Rewald] wrote of Seurat's paintings such as The Fishing Fleet at Port-en-Bessin that he was "the first to render the feeling which the sea inspires on a calm day." Another was moved by these "really beautiful seascapes, canvases enveloped in a grey dust of light ... :· But Seurat answered: "Certain critics do me the honor of crediting me with poetry. But I paint according to my method, caring for nothing else." [Seurat (New York: 1946)] Seurat's method! No painter since Uccello and his "dear perspec­ tive" had ever sacrificed so constantly, so passionately to a method - the little dots of primary colors each an act of calculation sanctioned by the physicists, the lines and tones of the composition systematically related to a scheme of emotional responses. Seurat' s art: the oval patches of grass in the foreground of Port-en­ Bessin announce the counterpoint played between the small, sharply­ angled white sails and the gentle ovals of cloud shadows as they move together (diminuendo poco a poco) into the distance until they are resolved by the horizon. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Masters of Modern Art

49. CHAIM SOUTINE, French (b. Lithuania) (1893-1943)

The Old Mill {c. 1922-23)

Oil on canvas, 261/8 x 32 3/8 in. (66.4 x 82.2 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Vladimir Horowitz and Bernard Davis Funds, 1954

Soutine came from the little village of Smilovitchi near Minsk [in Lithuania]. He was one of the numerous children of a humble and very poor tailor, who intended his son to become a cobbler. At the age of thirteen left home to take some drawing lessons in Minsk and in 1910 went to Vilna, where he spent three years at the local art school. In 1913 he arrived in Paris and there, during two years of extreme poverty, studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Cormon' s studio. He soon became acquainted with many of the foreign-born artists congregated in Paris, including the sculptors Zadkine and Lipchitz and the painters Chagall and Modigliani. In 1919 Soutine met the dealer Leopold Zborowski and at his suggestion spent most of the next three years in Ceret, a small town in the Pyrenees, and

80 in Cagnes, on the Riviera. When he returned to Paris in 1922 with about two hundred pictures Zborowski brought him to the attention of the American collector Dr. Albert Barnes, who bought in one trans­ action a large part of Soutine's stock of paintings. Although this good fortune relieved Soutine of his struggle to secure the bare necessities of life, chronic bad health and a temperamental disposition toward self­ torment and bitter revolt continued to exact a toll of misery and anguish as long as he lived. Although his paintings are immensely subjective in style and sub­ ject matter, Sou tine studied old masters, and their influence made suc­ cessive impressions on his work. He admired El Greco and Tintoretto, and, nearer to his own time, Cezanne and Bannard. The artists to whom he was especially attracted, however, were Courbet and Rembrandt, whose painting of a slaughtered ox incited him to make a similar picture. He also used Rembrandt's Hendrickje Bathing as the basis for a painting. Soutine infused all his paintings with his characteristic turbulence. He did landscape, portraits, and still life, approaching each in an equally subjective way. In his landscapes, especially those painted at Ceret, buildings are shown toppling, and the topography is convulsive, as if in volcanic upheaval. ... Soutine relied for his aesthetic effects on very varied surfaces with some passages of heavy impasto, on a very individual, unconstrained brush stroke, and on his brilliant command of color, juxtaposing strong, jewel-like tones in original and startling combinations. More than any of the painters who were his contem­ poraries in Paris, he gave a concrete form to the emotional violence that lies at the heart of Expressionism. Alt~ough there is little or no re­ semblance in their work, Soutine and Vfncent van Gogh have much in common; aliens from society, both showed an utter disregard for cur­ rent conventions in painting. Margaretta M. Salinger French Paintings

81 50. YVES T ANGUY, American (b. France) (1900-1955)

Mama, Papa Is Wounded! (1927)

Oil on canvas, 361/4 x 283/4 in. (92.1 x 73 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase, 1936

One day in 1923 as Yves Tanguy was passing 's gallery in Paris, he happened to see a painting by Chirico in the window. That chance view determined that he was to become a painter. His early paintings from 1925 include recognizable but primitive images of figures, eggs, fish, and other obvious symbols. By 1927, however, in paintings such as ... Mama, Papa is Wounded! he was organizing biomorphic shapes in a deeply receding space. After this, the only changes in his style were a tightening of technique, heightening of color, and increasing density of composition. The lifelike abstract shapes of his mature paintings are reminiscent of those in Arp's wooden reliefs. Tanguy shaded these shapes to create the illusion of rounded, three-dimensional forms sitting on vast planes or hovering above them, casting long shadows reminiscent of Chirico's deep vistas and cast shadows. These smoothly curving, rocklike shapes- whether resting on the ground or floating above it- some­ times suggest tentacles, sometimes sprout hair, and occasionally resemble undersea fronds. Of all the early illusionist Surrealists, Tanguy alone did not define recognizable figures and objects. While the shapes, elongated shadow, deep illusionistic space, and eerie lighting substantiate the influence of Chirico and relate him to Magritte and Dali, the images defy exact identification. Tanguy never passed through a Cubist period as many Surrealists did. Self-taught, he painted highly personal images unlike those of any other artist. Paradoxically, his technique led him to a highly realistic style even though the images are not recognizable. Like Magritte and Chirico, it was the total poetic image that concerned him. Works such as ... Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927) were done shortly after he and his friend, the poet Jacques Pr€wert, joined the Surrealists in 1925; they suggest strange undersea regions and vast unexplored deserts. They are, in fact, windows opening on Tanguy's interior visions .... Tanguy' s art varied less than that of most Surrealists and is more difficult to discuss in terms of iconography. His images are neither

82 50. Yves Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded! symbols, nor could they have been done by using automatic methods; they are dream-like, yet dreams do not include such unrepresenta­ tional forms. Tanguy refused to try to explairt his art, claiming that he himself didn't understand it. We are forced to the same conclusion. Yet his works, though disorienting, do seem to awaken memories long buried in our unconscious. Edward B. Henning The Spirit of Surrealism

51. HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, French (1864-1901)

La Goulue (1891-92)

Oil on cardboard, 311/4 x 231/4 in. (79.4 x 59 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy, 1957

In 1892 Lautrec concerned himself predominantly with the Moulin Rouge and two of its leading dancers, La Goulue and Jane Avril. Here La Goulue is entering the Moulin, accompanied by her friend Mome Fromage on the left and a young dancer on the right. The three women are brilliantly characterized by the differences in their costumes and coiffures, and these are given further point by the contrast between the fine, grasping hands of La Goulue and the coarse, insensitive hand of Mome Fromage. The lecherous man in the background appears like an incarnation of fate. Louise Weber (1870-1929), known as La Goulue (The Glutton), was an Alsatian laundry-girl who was brought to Paris by the impresario Marcel Astruc in 1886. She first attracted attention at the Moulin de la Galette, where she was seen by Lautrec, who included her in several pictures in 1886-1887. In 1889 she played the leading part in a revue there; but then she moved first to the Jardin de Paris and in the autumn, when it opened, to the Moulin Rouge, where she became the star performer. All those who knew La Goulue agree that she "was pretty and at­ tractive to look at in a vulgar way" (Yvette Guilbert), but that she was also haughty, ferocious, brazen, coarse, and wanton. Her success was not, however, of long duration, for she ate and drank heavily. By 1895 she had already lost her charms and had grown too fat to perform in ; thereafter she was reduced to earning a living by per­ forming a danse du ventre in a booth at suburban fairs.

84 She appealed to Lautrec to decorate this booth, and he, rising to the occasion, painted two large panels (now in the Louvre) in which she is shown giving a brilliant display in front of a smart, admiring audience composed of many of the artist's friends. By 1905 La Goulue had become too fat to perform any more, and the later years of her life were spent in penury. She was the subject of at least a dozen pictures by Lautrec painted between 1886 and 1895. Douglas Cooper Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

85 CREDITS

Photographs: The Museum of Modern Art. Sunami: 3 2632; 8 9559; 10 13,562; 12 15,609; 14 12,115; 16 13,727; 22 8011; 3113,743; 35 6730; 37 6593; 40 14,108; 45 1059; 46 215; 50 1609. 24 Keller 1870. 32 Peterson 1195.

Permission to reprint from the following is gratefully acknowledged: 1,40 Reprinted by permission from The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973, pp. 145, 375, © 1971 Company. 1 The James Thrall So by Collection of works of art pledged or given to The Museum of Modern Art. Introduction by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Catalogue with notes by James Thrall Soby, © 1961 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 23. All rights reserved. 2 Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Max Beckmann's Triptychs by Charles S. Kessler. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, © 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, pp. 12, 14-17. 3 Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, Robert Rosenblum. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1960, pp. 60, 62, 64. 4 Reprinted with permission of The Art Institute of Chicago from Douglas Cooper, Braque: The Great Years, 1972, pp. 47, 57, 60-61. 5, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 28, 44, 45, 48 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Masters of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1954, pp. 22, 46-47, 34-35, 26-29, 73, 66, 12-13, 14-15, 25. All rights reserved. 6, 12, 16, 19, 29, 37, 43 Helen M. Franc, An Invitation to See: 125 Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art, © 1973 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pp. 30, 14, 19, 26-27, 66, 72, 94. All rights reserved. 7 Paul Cezanne, Meyer Schapiro. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1952, p. 122. 8, 19 Adapted from William S. Lieberman, A Treasury of Modern Drawing: The Joan and Lester A vnet Collection in The Museum of Modern Art, © 1978 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pp. 14-15, 26-27. All rights reserved. 9, 10 James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, The Museum of Modern Art, 1955, pp. 71-72, 75-76, 78. All rights reserved. 11, 17, 33, 34, 39, 42 From or adapted from WilliamS. Lieberman, ed.,

86 Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975, pp. 128, 134, 172, 92, 236, 76. 20 Reprinted by permission from Collection of the Societe Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920, © 1950 by Art Gallery, p.10. 23 A selection from Paul Klee by Carola Giedion-Welcker, translat­ ed by Alexander Gode. The Viking Press, 1952, p. 138. Used by permission. 24 William Rubin, "Klee's Cat and Bird," from MoMA: A Publication for Members of The Museum of Modern Art, no. 7, Spring 1976. © 1976 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 25, 32, 50 Reprinted with the permission of The from Edward B. Henning, The Spirit of Surrealism, The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1979, pp. 110-11, 90-91, 94-95, 97. 28 Kokoschka to Miller, Oct. 10, 1953, Archives of the Museum of Modern Art. 30 Leger, Werner Schmalenbach. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1976, p. 146. 31 Reprinted with permission of The Art Institute of Chicago from Katharine Kuh, Leger, 1953, p. 64 33 K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, vol. 1, edited by Troels Andersen, translated by Xenia Glowacki Pros and Arnold McMillin, Rapp and Whiting Ltd., London, 1969, pp. 120-22. By permission of Andre Deutsch Ltd. on behalf of Rapp and Whiting Ltd. 34, 35, 36 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, © 1951, 1978 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pp. 174, 184. All rights reserved. 36 The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. XXIV, no. 4, Summer 1957, p. 3. 38 William Rubin, Miro from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 87. All rights reserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 40 Reprinted by permission of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969, p. 15. 41 William C. Seitz. Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1960, pp. 38, 40. All rights reserved. 41 Claude Monet, William C. Seitz. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1960, p. 158.

87 42 Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the , Washington, from "Major Paintings," by Arne Eggum in Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 1978, pp. 39-40. 47 John House, in Post-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European Painting. © Royal Academy of Arts 1979. Published by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, p. 133. 48 Georges Seurat, Pierre Courthion. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1968, p. 146. 49 Margaretta M. Salinger in French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. III, Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger, © 1967 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 242-43. 51 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Douglas Cooper. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1956, p. 94.

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