Wilfredo Lam, 1950, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Mr. Joseph Cantor, 1974

“In Zambezia, Zambezia Lam depicted an iconic woman partly inspired by the femme-cheval (horse-headed woman) of the Santeria cult. He frequently used the device of transmogrification of body parts to suggest magical metamorphosis, inspired by indigenous American and African ritual objects. In this painting it is manifested in the testicle “chin” of the figure.” — Jennifer Blessing

Henri Matisse, 1916, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York By exchange, 1982

“Henri Matisse often painted the same subject in versions that range from relatively realistic to more abstract or schematic. At times the transition from realism to abstraction could be enacted in a single canvas, as is the case with The Italian Woman, the first of many portraits Matisse painted of a professional Italian model named Laurette. The purposefully visible pentimenti and labored convergence of lines bear witness to his perpetual struggle “to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.” Matisse was not interested in capturing momentary impressions; he strove to create an enduring conception.

From the earlier state of the portrait, which depicts a heavier woman, Matisse pared down Laurette’s image, in the process making her less corporeal and more ethereal. Using the conventions of religious painting—a frontal pose, introspective countenance, and flat back-ground devoid of any indication of location—he created an icon of Woman. The emphatic eyes and brow, elongated nose, and pursed lips of her schematic face resemble an African mask, implying that Matisse, like so many Modern artists, equated the idea of Woman with the foreign, exotic, and “primitive”; he continued in this vein, posing the same model with a turban and a mantilla.

The spatial ambiguity of this portrait—the way the arms appear flat while the background overtakes a shoulder, for example—reveals Matisse’s relationship to Paul Cézanne via the bolder experiments of Cubism. In a 1913 portrait of his wife, Matisse had played with the distinctions between volume and plane by including a flattened scarf that wraps around her arm. This treatment anticipates the shawl-like background of The Italian Woman. These paintings recall Cézanne’s series of portraits of Madame Cézanne (one of which was owned by Matisse) both formally and iconographically, although Matisse’s images are more radically schematized and distilled.

The austerity of color and severe reduction of The Italian Woman is characteristic of Matisse’s work from 1914 to 1918. The art historian Pierre Schneider has suggested that these elements embody the artist’s response to the devastation of World War I.”

Jennifer Blessing

Amedeo Modigliani, 1918-19, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift

"When Amedeo Modigliani moved from Italy to Paris in 1906, the leading artists of the avant-garde were exploring the forms and construction of “primitive” objects. Inspired by Paul Gauguin’s directly carved sculptures, which were exhibited in a retrospective that year, Constantin Brancusi, André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso began to make archaizing stone and wood sculptures. Brancusi, with whom Modigliani developed a close friendship, exerted a strong influence on the Italian; this is particularly obvious in his attempts at carving between the years 1909 and 1915, when he made idol-like heads and caryatids with monumental and simplified forms.

Modigliani’s sculptural concerns were translated into paint in Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater, in which he portrayed his young companion as a kind of fertility goddess. With her highly stylized narrow face and blank eyes she has the serene countenance of a deity, and the artist’s emphasis on massive hips and thighs mimics the focus of ancient sculptures that fetishize reproduction. Both this work and Nude, with their simplified, elongated oval faces, gracefully attenuated noses, and button mouths, suggest the artist’s interest in African masks.

Modigliani painted the human figure almost exclusively and created at least 26 reclining female nudes. Although the impact of Modernist practice on his art was great, he was also profoundly concerned with tradition; the poses of Nude and similar works echo precursors by Titian, Goya, and Velázquez. Nevertheless, Modigliani’s figures differ significantly in the level of raw sensuality they transmit. His nudes have often been considered lascivious, even pornographic, in part because they are depicted with body hair, but perhaps also due to the artist’s reputation for debauchery. His nickname, Modi, rhymes with the French word maudit (accursed), a name he very likely acquired because of his lifestyle. Modigliani died of tuberculosis and complications probably brought on by substance abuse and hard living. The tragic fact that Jeanne Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, committed suicide the next day has only contributed to the infusion of romantic speculation concerning Modigliani’s work."

Jennifer Blessing

Jackson Pollock, 1943-5, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

"Two (1943–45), depicts a figurative subject in emblematic, abstract terms derived from various sources, among them tribal painting and Pablo Picasso’s Cubist works. Rapidly applied strokes of thick black paint harshly delimit the two totemic figures. A columnar figure on the left, probably male, faces the center. Black contours only partially delineate the white and flesh colored areas that signify his body, as Pollock separates and liberates line from a descriptive function. The figure on the right, possibly female, bends and thrusts as it approaches the static figure on the left—a sexual union of the two is implied at the juncture of their bodies in the center of the canvas. Brought together in agitated union, the two figures suggest the primacy of the male and the female in the genesis of human life."

Rufino Tamayo, 1959, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675): Mauritshuis

Wifredo Lam, 1950, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cantor, 1958

“When Wifredo Lam arrived in Paris in 1938 he carried a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso, with whom he had an immediate rapport. Soon he met many other leading artistic figures, among them André Breton, the dominant publicist and theorist of Surrealism. The Surrealists, who attempted to unleash the power of the unconscious through explorations of dream states and automatist writing, were fascinated by the mythologies of “primitive” people. They subscribed to an anthropology that perceived modern “primitive” cultures as the heirs to an integrated understanding of myth and reality, which they hoped to achieve themselves. Lam, as a Cuban of African, Chinese, and European descent, seemed to the Surrealists to have privileged access to that undifferentiated state of mind. In 1942 the artist returned to Cuba, where he constructed a body of work in a Surrealist idiom, creating symbolic creatures engaged in ritual acts of initiation. Lam’s vocabulary of vegetal-animal forms was inspired by Afro-Cuban and Haitian Santeria deities. He also associated with the nationalist poets of the Négritude movement, who relied in their work on the images and rhythms of their native culture.

Rumblings of the Earth represents a synthesis of Lam’s concerns in his work of the 1940s. This painting melds his reaction to the European artistic legacy with his own goals and the indigenous traditions of his country. Here, Lam referred to Picasso’s 1937 Guernica through direct quotations and more abstract correspondences, but he transformed Picasso’s political statement by replacing the central victim of Guernica, the horse, with a spectral presence bearing a large knife, described by Lam as “the instrument of integrity.” An aggressive painting, Rumblings of the Earth includes vaginal and phallic references that focus the work thematically on the cycle of birth and death while suggesting ritual initiation and violence. For Lam, revolutionary violence was a means of liberation; in his hands, the victim in Picasso’s canvas has become the aggressor.”

Jennifer Blessing

Gustave Courbet, 1866, Realism, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Kenneth Noland, 1961, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012

Jackson Pollock, 1942, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

“Like other members of the New York School, Jackson Pollock was influenced in his early work by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, and seized on the Surrealists’ concept of the unconscious as the source of art. In the late 1930s Pollock introduced imagery based on totemic or mythic figures, ideographic signs, and ritualistic events, which have been interpreted as pertaining to the buried experiences and cultural memories of the psyche.

The Moon Woman suggests the example of Picasso, particularly his Girl Before a Mirror of 1932. The palettes are similar, and both artists describe a solitary standing female as if she had been x-rayed, her backbone a broad black line from which her curving contours originate. Frontal and profile views of the face are combined to contrast two aspects of the self, one serene and public, the other dark and interior.

The subject of the moon woman, which Pollock treated in several drawings and paintings of the early 1940s, could have been available to him from various sources. At this time many artists, among them Pollock’s friends William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, were influenced by the fugitive, hallucinatory imagery of Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists. In his prose poem “Favors of the Moon” Baudelaire addresses the “image of the fearful goddess, the fateful godmother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world.” The poem, which is known to have inspired Baziotes’s Mirror at Midnight, completed in 1942, alludes to “ominous flowers that are like the censers of an unknown rite,” a phrase uncannily applicable to Pollock’s bouquet at the upper right. Although it is possible that Pollock knew the poem, it is likelier that he was affected in a more general way by the interest in Baudelaire and the Symbolists that was pervasive during the period."

Lucy Flint

1996

1984,
Marble