Highlights from the Modern Art Collection

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Vasily Kandinsky assured his reputation as a central figure in the development of modern art through his pioneering abstract work in Munich prior to World War I. In 1911 he and fellow artist Franz Marc formed the German Expressionist association Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The following year, Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a seminal text in the history of art.

From 1910 to 1914, Kandinsky painted a series of highly abstracted works called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, terms he appropriated from music. These paintings are imbued with a turbulent, apocalyptic quality and contain veiled references to torrential floods, spear-wielding knights on horseback, and other evocative subjects. Kandinsky defined the Improvisations as paintings produced out of a sudden and unconscious inner impulse. The quivering brushstrokes, fluid lines, and saturated hues in Untitled Improvisation III combine to create the sort of work that Kandinsky believed would move the soul, like an inspiring piece of music. He fervently sought to reach viewers on a spiritual level and thereby combat the materialist forces that he felt imperiled modern society.

Untitled Improvisation III was formerly owned by the artist Gabriele Munter and then by Hans Hofmann, the Abstract Expressionist painter who brought the work with him when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1931. (2003 LACMA handbook)

La Trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) (The Treachery of images [This is not a pipe]) is one of Rene Magritte's Surrealist masterpieces and an icon of modern art. Heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, Surrealism represented a reaction against the "Rationalism" that some believed led Europe into the horrors of World War I. It attempted to join the realm of dreams and fantasy to the everyday world.

Magritte's word-image paintings are treatises on the impossibility of reconciling words, images, and objects. La Trahison des images challenges the linguistic convention of identifying an image of something as the thing itself. At first, Magritte's point appears simplistic, almost to the point of provocation: A painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself. In fact, this work is highly paradoxical. Its realistic style and caption format recall advertising, a field in which Magritte had worked. Advertisements, however, elicit recognition without hesitation or equivocation; this painting causes the viewer to ponder its conflicting messages.

Magritte's use of text in his word-image paintings influenced a younger generation of conceptually oriented artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. (2003 LACMA handbook)

The Gamblers is related to a commission Marc Chagall received in 1919 to design scenery for a production of Nicolati Gogol's 1843 play of the same name at the Hermitage Theater in St. Petersburg. The influence of Russian folk art and mysticism that came to define the artist's work is perceptible in the drawing, which is characterized by bold and expressive colors and anatomical and spacial distortions. The spare palette of The Gamblers, as well as its simplicity and clarity of drawing and composition, bespeak its connection to a theater set.

The monumental and isolated figure in the drawing's foreground is Ikharev, the central character of Gogol's play. He throws his bilious green head back in despair, sickened by a universal corruption in which he is himself complicit. The absurdity and paradox that lay at the heart of Gogol's aesthetic held particular appeal for Chagall. A larger reading of The Gamblers suggests that it be viewed as a meditation on man's alienation and the capriciousness of fate.

Chagall had returned to Russia in 1914 after several years in Paris, where he observed and absorbed the lessons of Cubism among other early-twentieth-century artistic movements. In this second Russian period (which lasted until 1923, when he returned to Paris), Chagall was closely involved with the theater, first in Vitebsk, Belorussia, as the Bolshevik-appointed Commissar of Fine Arts, and later in Moscow and St. Petersburg. (2003 LACMA handbook)

The year 1911 was a milestone for the avant-garde German Expressionist group Die Brucke (The Bridge). That autumn, its three key artists — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff — moved to Berlin from Dresden, where they had worked since 1905. The pulsating vitality of this modern city was immediately reflected in their paintings and prints.

In Two Women, Kirchner depicted a pair of seamstresses on a Berlin street. The figure on the right resembles his friend Dodo ( Doris ) Grosse, who frequently modeled for the artist. Characteristic of Kirchner's work of this period, this painting is executed in strong colors and jagged lines, showing the awareness of Fauve as well as African and Oceanic art. He presents his two female subjects forcefully and directly and makes no attempt to beautify them; rather, he gives them lurid yellow complexions set off by rich black garments. This depiction remains less aggressive, however, than the many images Kirchner painted of hard-bitten and overtly sexualized young women on city streets, which reveal even more ambivalence toward modern urban life.

Kirchner resumed work on Two Women in the early 1920s in Davos, Switzerland, where he moved in 1918 following a war-induced nervous collapse. At this time, he heightened the contrast between various dark and light passages in the painting — for example, between the women's coats and the decorative cloth backdrop. On the reverse of Two Women is Kirchner's Indian Dancer in Yellow Skirt (1911), a seductive, barefoot dancer in exotic dress that reveals an interest in "primitive" or non-Western subjects that Kirchner shared with other Die Brucke artists. (2003 LACMA handbook)

The years immediately after World War I were filled with great ferment and experimentation. In this climate, poet, artist, and photographer Kurt Schwitters developed his own unique aesthetic, which he called "Merz". The concept was based on assemblage — the combining of ordinary objects with artistic elements. For Schwitters, Merz was an attempt to achieve freedom from all social, political, and cultural fetters.

Construction for Noble Ladies is one of Schwitters's large-scale reliefs known as Merzbilder (Merz pictures). It is revolutionary in its incorporation of everyday detritus — a funnel, broken wheels, a flattened metal toy train, and a ticket for shipping a bicycle by train — yet like other Merzbilder, it remains an elegantly composed picture. A traditional portrait of a "noble lady"" in profile, turned on her side and facing upward, is also included. These various found materials, seemingly whimsical and casual, are transformed into formal artistic elements by their arrangement according to Cubist principles. Embedded in the composition are hints of a narrative. (2003 LACMA handbook)

Together with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque invented Cubism. Their paintings from the years 1909 to 1914 seemed to grow one from the other, indicating the close relationship between the artists. Cubism was an art of everyday life tied particularly to the cafes of Paris; the works include vestiges of real-life referents (wood-grain paper, newspapers, packages of tobacco, and so forth).

Still Life with Violin is a transitional work between the two phases of Cubism, the Analytic and the Synthetic. (The terms were coined by the artists' zealous Parisian dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.) Braque incorporated the hallmarks of Analytic Cubism in his fragmentation of form into multiple shifting planes and in his use of a restrained palette of browns and grays. His depiction of wood grain signals the rise of Synthetic Cubism, in which the fragmented planes are simplified, flattened out through a lack of shading, and combined into often patterned forms that give the illusion of recognizable objects. The wood-grained rectangle in Still Life with Violin conjures up an image of a violin's gleaming wood surface; the S-scrolls suggest sound holes; and the horizontal bars suggest a sheet of music. Braque's use of the oval format, which he devised in 1909, is characteristic of his Cubist works, as is his inclusion of snippets of floating typography such as the one here reading "Duo pour" (duet for). For the Cubists, form took primacy over subject matter. (2003 LACMA handbook)

Tea is the largest painting executed by Henri Matisse in the years just after World War I. It marks a notable departure from the artist's Fauve work, in which he sought to transform his feelings into pure color. This garden scene depicts Matisse's model Henriette, his daughter Marguerite, and his dog Lili relaxing at the artist's residence in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Although Matisse's use of sunlight evokes the Impressionists' attraction to painting directly from nature, he focused more on communicating the cool lushness of the scene through adherence to local color.

The masklike face of Marguerite, on the right, reflects the artist's long-standing interest in African art and contrasts sharply with the more conventionally rendered face of Henriette. In this sense, Tea is a logical extension of Matisse's formative work Heads of Jeannette (1910-13), also in the museum's collection, in which he progressively abstracted the female visage in a sequence of five bronze sculptures.

In 1929 British art critic Roger Fry remarked that he found this painting to be “one of the most complete expressions of Matisse's highest powers.” Tea was the last major Matisse painting acquired by Michael and Sarah Stein, brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein and notable collectors in their own right. (2003 LACMA handbook)

Mikhail Larionov played a pivotal role in advancing the most revolutionary artistic thinking in Russia. He and his companion, the artist Natalia Goncharova, spearheaded what they termed a Neoprimitive style. They urged fellow Russian artists not simply to imitate Western European modernism but to find inspiration in unique, indigenous follk art practices. By including pictorial distortions and crudely lettered graffiti in Dancing Soldiers, Larionov borrowed from the Russian tradition of the peasant lubok (popular woodblock illustration).

Dancing Soldiers, based on Larionov's own experience of military service, portrays a raucous scene of soldiers at leisure. Two men engaged in a card game curse at each other, while a third drunkenly plays the accordion and sings a bawdy tune. By deliberately flattening the pictorial surface, Larionov makes the soldiers appear to float in an amorphous red space, heightening the scene's fanciful quality. The painting was shown in the 1910 exhibition in Moscow organized by the avant-garde Jack of Diamonds group, of which Larionov and Goncharova were founding members. (2003 LACMA handbook)

During the 1920s, Vasily Kandinsky was one of the most influential instructors at the Bauhaus, the experimental art school founded at Weimar, then later reestablished at Dessau. Previously in his native Russia during and after World War I, while under the influence of Constructivists Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, the artist began to move away from the freewheeling and organic abstraction of the prewar years toward a purer geometric language. Kandinsky produced Semicircle during his Bauhaus period, when his predilection for geometric forms had fully asserted itself.

The circles, semicircles, triangles, rectangles, checkerboards, and squares that populate Semicircle are all arranged according to strict color and compositional harmonies carefully worked out by the artist. Floating in a sea of liquid orange, his forms defy the traditional relationship in painting between figure and ground. For Kandinsky, the circle had symbolic and cosmic meaning: The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions, he wrote in 1929. "I love the circle today as I formerly loved the horse." Significantly, Kandinsky's drawings, which were often preliminary studies for paintings, achieved an independent status during this period, perhaps to a greater degree than before or after. (2003 LACMA handbook)

The subject of the artist and his model preoccupied Pablo Picasso at least from the late 1920s. Female Nude Kneeling before a Mirror dates from a period of intense graphic activity, during which Picasso was working on his famous series of one hundred etchings, the Vollard Suite, forty-six of which were devoted to the theme of the sculptor in his studio.

In these images, Picasso mingled the Neoclassicism that characterized much of his work of the 1920s with 1930s Surrealism. Elements of both styles are evident in Female Nude Kneeling before a Mirror, a drawing characterized by sensuous calligraphic lines and rich washes of color. The voluptuous modeling of the female form, with its cross-hatching and decorative patterning of tear-shaped pen strokes, gives the drawing a particular vibrancy.

The kneeling nude — her head thrown back, her arms raised, her mouth slightly open — seems autoerotically absorbed by her own reflection in the mirror. At the same time, a bearded man (a frequent surrogate for Picasso) peers at her voyeuristically through an open window. The act of observing, both passive (the mirror) and active (the model/muse, the voyeur, the artist, the external viewer), thus becomes the drawing's central theme. Its mystery and sexual tension are further enhanced by the candle, which provides the chamber's only light and casts a yellow glow across the model's naked form. (2003 LACMA handbook)

Pablo Picasso's long career comprised several successive and radical shifts in formal concerns and, to a lesser degree, in subject matter. During and after his stylistic periods — Blue, Rose, Cubism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism — Picasso explored themes in his own life and the world around him.

In 1937 Picasso executed his mammoth antiwar canvas Guernica , a protest to the carnage of the Spanish Civil War. After Picasso completed Guernica he abandoned all but one of its motifs: the weeping woman. He drew her frequently, almost obsessively, for the next several months.

Tears all over her face, the figure in Weeping Woman with Handkerchief is an emblem of despair. Yet crowned with the traditional matronly mantilla, she is also the embodiment of Spanish womanhood. She represented Picasso's public and private agony: She was the victim of war, the grieving mother, the terrified peasant, the stunned survivor; but more specifically, she was a portrait of his lover, the artist-photographer Dora Maar, one in a long line of Picasso's muses. Picasso's dramatic relationships with women informed the metaphors he used to express the intensity of his feelings over events in Spain. (2003 LACMA handbook)