Wilfred Owen obituary

News of the poet’s death reached his family as the bells rang out in celebration of the armistice and received only a passing mention in the long lists of casualties. The Times now publishes his obituary

Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen in 1916, the year he was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment

His subject was war, and the pity of war. Wilfred Owen’s preface to his poetry was found among his papers in an unfinished condition; he had hoped to publish his work in 1919. “All the poet can do today is to warn,” he added. “That is why the true poets must be truthful.”

Owen had experienced at first hand the pain inflicted by war and knew of what he wrote. “Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead,” are the opening lines to Greater Love, in which he describes in graphic, violent detail the “piteous mouths that coughed” and “hearts made great with shot”.

Much of Owen’s poetry was written in a creative burst while he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where the cries of traumatised patients echoed in the corridors. It was there that he met other men who would become known as poets of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, who introduced him to the idea of the “protest poem”, and Robert Graves, whom Owen described as “a big, rather plain fellow”. Like Milton, Owen was keen that his poetry should not merely be a passive witness to events, but rather an active response to the suffering he had seen and endured.

Sir VS Naipaul obituary

Nobel prizewinning author whose books posed profound questions about the postcolonial world

VS Naipaul in 2001, the year he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature

Did VS Naipaul set out to cause offence, or did it happen by accident? Few would take issue with the Nobel prizewinner’s immense talent as an author, yet he also succeeded in getting up the noses of almost everyone he encountered, becoming English literature’s greatest postcolonial writer and a pariah to the postcolonial literary world, who no doubt felt that he had taken on the values of the old colonial masters.

For many his best book was A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which tells the story of one man’s lifelong struggle to create meaning and permanence out of poverty and insignificance. He never made any secret of the fact that the story was based on the experience of his father and his conflict with a large clan of Hindu relations ranging from landowners to labourers.

Митці

http://maysterni.com/user.php?id=107

Юрій Андрухович

Bad Company
Грицько – як усі тенори, педераст.
Іван – бонвіван, франкмасон, фармазон.
Тарас – пияк і шланH, особливо на службі.
Панько – графоман, а Марко – гермафродит.
Панас мудодзвін, Борис буквоїд,
Якович – атеїст кінчений, духовидець.
Леська і Олька лесбіянки.

Що й казати – паскудне товариство.
Але в XX столітті картина має ще гірший вигляд:
Павло Григорович – істинний сковородинець, так само тенор, арфістка.
Максим Тадейович – мало що балабол, то ще й поляк.
Бажан – жид, Фітільов – кацап.
Мовчу про Бургардта і Йогансена.
Микола Зеров: був би нічого,
Тільки от зуби зіпсовані.
Інженер Маланюк з кадетською виправкою,
прямий, як єдина звивина.
Доктор Донцов, ще пряміший,
з руками чистими навіть після гри в карти.
Доктор Кандиба, розвідник надр.
Доктор Петров, просто розвідник.
Потім ще пару чекістів, два-три комуняки,
десяток академіків
і – наввипередки, хто кого швидше здасть.

Самовбивць замало як на велику літературу,
ну та нічого.

Література могла бути іншою,
казав мій приятель, але дивися, дивися, хто це робив!
Виключно живі люди: невдахи, пристосуванці, мученики.
Самі тобі зболені, хворі, скулені,
саме тобі обскубане птаство, підбите, нелітаюче, бідне.
Література не могла бути іншою.
Слава Богу, що дав нам саме таку – небораками писану.

Обличчя перекошене, піт на скронях,
сухість у роті, запах сірки, нудота,
темний глухий підвал.
Надобраніч, класики, поговоримо завтра.
Здерта шкура Гомбровича
безгучно падає вниз.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: A painting that pointed the way to art’s future

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/charles-saatchis-great-masterpiecesa-painting-thatpointed-way/

 St. John the Baptist, 1513-16 (fragment) by Leonardo Da Vinci 

So much is known about the polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519): he is probably the most studied and dissected figure in history. His painting techniques leave artists still in wonderment today.He managed to establish imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and his brushwork is often so subtle it is difficult to detect the strokes, even on close inspection. His invention of “sfumato”, meaning vanished or evaporated, enabled him to blend his colours and outlines, as he described it, “without borders, in the manner of smoke”.
Leonardo was entranced by the fall and play of light on surfaces and flesh. He wanted to perfect a luminescence in his portraits, applying layer upon layer of faint, almost transparent colour, in thin veils. It allowed his subjects to glow in ethereal splendour.
When describing the painting Mona Lisa, Giorgio Vasari, chronicler of the Renaissance, said, “As art may imitate nature, she does not appear to be painted, but truly of flesh and blood. On looking closely at the pit of her throat, one could swear that the pulses were beating.” Of course, it is well known that Leonardo drew upon his own fascination with human anatomy to achieve such realism. His interest in capturing the sinews and musculature of the body led him to dismember corpses, at a time when embalming was not practised and bodies were hard to preserve. 

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: George Grosz's furious and vitriolic work that highlights man’s depravity

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-george-groszs-furious-vitriolic/

Scathing indictment: the protagonist in Eclipse of the Sun (1926) is said to be Paul von Hindenburg

It would be difficult to find an artist whose work was more furious and more profoundly vitriolic than that of George Grosz (1893-1959). The only other painter who ever approached his towering rage was Goya, with pictures that grimly revealed the atrocities of war.
Grosz’s portrayal of life in Weimar Germany in the early decades of the 20th-century are slashingly vicious and as arresting as a withering satirical cartoon. He skewered the bloated businessmen who profiteered from the nation’s financial woes, and the worst excesses of the political classes in the build-up to Nazism. His work was laser-sharp at pinpointing corruption and hypocrisy, holding up his cast of subjects to ridicule and contempt. He didn’t use specific individuals, but rather allegorical types representing the targets of his displeasure.
Unsurprisingly, his views on post-First World War German society were considered such negative propaganda by the authorities that he was arrested three times and heavily fined. It was clear that neither Grosz nor his art were wanted in Germany, and he gladly took up an offer to teach in New York in 1933, just as Hitler became chancellor of Germany, coming closer to totalitarian power.

George Grosz, Eclipse of the Sun (detail), 1926 

Before he became a leading member of the Berlin Dada group, he had been discharged from the military for being mentally unfit. His drawings and sketches concentrated on social decay and the growth of militarism, the gulf between the rich and poor, greedy capitalists, the smug bourgeoisie – as well as hollow-faced factory labourers, disabled war veterans, and the unemployed, eking out life on the fringe.
After emigrating to the US, his work took a less misanthropic turn, and he seemed content to generally paint attractive landscapes. Even so, his striking painting The Survivor, painted at the height of the Second World War, was considered so offensive by the Nazi regime that he was designated “Cultural Bolshevik Number One”.
When he had arrived in America, among the works he was carrying was his 1926 painting Eclipse of the Sun. It hadn’t been shown in Germany because, for once, its main protagonist was clearly identifiable – Paul von Hindenberg, the avaricious industrialist and president of the German Reich. The painting is a scathing indictment of what we refer to today as the military-industrial complex, whereby a network of individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons typically attempts to marshal political support for increased military spending by the government.
The painting shows a seated general and four headless bureaucrats, who are obviously blind to any shady deals taking place. Grosz used the sun as a central symbol of life, eclipsed by a dollar sign, generally accepted as signifying greed. The donkey represents a typical self-important burgher, wearing blinders to signify his dumb ignorance. Below, a small child appears to be imprisoned. Perhaps the child evokes the dissident voice of youth that has been muffled? Or simply a brutal lack of concern for coming generations?

George Grosz

But there was no appetite for such eviscerating pictures in the US. Grosz largely relied on his modest teaching income from various institutions. When he found himself increasingly short of cash, he parted with Eclipse of the Sun to cover a paltry outstanding debt. In 1968, the picture was sold to the local Heckscher Museum in Long Island, for $15,000 (£11,000).
In 2005, this small provincial museum decided to offload the painting to pay for building expansion and general renovations. It appears that, over time, the significance of the work had become apparent in the art world but, on the brink of a $19 million sale, news of the impending transaction leaked. The ensuing protests were outraged and vocal, and the Heckscher Museum felt obliged to abandon the deal. The museum vowed instead to grant the painting a dedicated prime position, so that it could now be more widely admired as “the museum’s most prized possession” and “one of the most important paintings in 20th century art”.
Grosz’s images continue to haunt viewers today. The Faith Healers, for instance, from 1917, also known as Fit for Active Service, shows us a doctor inspecting a skeleton with a makeshift ear trumpet, and declaring him KV – short for kriegsverwendungsfähig, or fit for combat. The picture refers to those soldiers who had previously been discharged for medical reasons but had been recalled to return to the front after German troops had suffered heavy losses.
In A Funeral: Tribute to Oskar Panizza, from 1918, Grosz’s disgust at the state of German society in the tumultuous post-war years illustrates his sense of claustrophobia. The collage-like technique draws on cubism and futurism to present hordes of distorted and skeletal figures in a hellish chasm of buildings, which lean precariously over them. The fiery reds and stark blacks create an unsettling tribute to Oskar Panizza, the controversial avant-garde author. 

Grosz described compositions such as this as a “gin alley of grotesque dead bodies and madmen… a teeming throng of possessed human animals…wherever you step, there’s the smell of sh--”.
In truth, it is probably more revealing to let Grosz explain his work in his own words: “My drawings express my despair, hate and disillusionment. I drew drunkards, puking men, men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands… I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of a tenement house; through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another two people making love: from a third hung a suicide with its body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a straitjacket made of horse blanket… I also wrote poetry.”
A leading French critic declared his work “the most definitive catalogue of man’s depravity in all history”. Grosz died in West Berlin three weeks after returning to his native country for a visit in 1959.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Toulouse-Lautrec conjured a world where an outsider could feel at home

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-toulouse-lautrec-conjured/

Detail from At the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was born into an aristocratic family, but unfortunately, the wrong one. He suffered from a number of congenital health conditions and a skeletal abnormality related to decades of inbreeding between relatives – his parents were first cousins, as were other members of the family.By the age of 15, he had broken both of his thigh bones, neither of which healed properly; the result was that his legs no longer continued to grow. As an adult he stood only 4ft 8in tall, and had difficulty walking, relying on the use of a cane. The handicap left Lautrec unable to participate in activities enjoyed by most boys of his age. Frequently bedridden, he immersed himself in art instead. But despite his mother’s hope that he would pursue this interest and become a well-respected painter, Lautrec began haunting Montmartre, then considered home to the underbelly of Parisian society.
It was certainly popular with artists: rents were low, the bars plentiful, and the atmosphere less socially constrictive than the rest of Paris. Here, Lautrec befriended the local prostitutes, and enjoyed the seedier side of bohemian life, only very occasionally painting a landscape or two.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Jan Van Eyck's project of the most blatant vanity

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpiecesjan-van-eycksproject-mostblatant/

The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (detail) by Jan van Eyck

Jan Van Eyck is often credited as the inventor of oil painting. Yet although he is certainly the first artist who fully mastered the technique, in fact oils had been used in Indian and Chinese paintings as far back as the fifth century.
Nevertheless, the many who have admired Van Eyck’s extraordinary The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), at the National Gallery, will appreciate that he truly was a visionary. This small painting is not only sublimely beautiful, it is so rich with puzzling detail and metaphor that it has transfixed artists since it was completed. Van Eyck even signed the painting unconventionally: an inscription on the wall above the convex mirror in the background, “Jan Van Eyck was here 1434”.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Eugène Delacroix's lush scene of horror that put France in its place

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieceseugene-delacroixs-lush-scene/

The Death of Sardanapalus (detail) by Eugène Delacroix

There is still debate about the identity of the artist Eugène Delacroix’s father, both possible candidates having been powerful political figures.What is certain is that, despite being born into privilege in 1798, he was fortunate to survive his infancy. Left for a lot of the time in the care of nannies and housekeepers, he was once almost burnt to death and left permanently scarred when his sleepy nurse overlooked a candle falling into his crib.
Another of his nannies dropped Delacroix into the ocean, when, as she leant over the side of a docking ship to embrace her lover, the child slipped from her arms. He was also accidentally poisoned, nearly choking to death.
Yet, despite these brushes with calamity, Delacroix survived to become one of the vital artists of the French Romantic movement.
His ostensible father was Charles-François Delacroix, the Minister of French Foreign Affairs. Charles-François supported his son’s creative studies and the young artist slowly secured himself a solid reputation within the Salon de Paris. Paintings exploring the Greek War of Independence, such as The Massacre at Chios, painted in 1824 when Delacroix was 26, were well received.
Yet the drama of his infancy seemed to haunt Delacroix like a dark shadow. Doubts were cast over Charles-François’s paternal claim – he was supposedly infertile at the time of Eugène’s conception.
Many historians have argued that the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was the artist’s biological father, thanks to a physical resemblance between the two, and the support he gave Delacroix.
Talleyrand is a peculiar, intriguing figure: a laicised bishop, politician and diplomat, his role in the French Revolution remains the subject of considerable debate. For some, he is a trusted and integral agent of the French government, for others, a Machiavellian traitor. Yet one fact remains clear: he always protected Delacroix, helping to secure his reputation as an admirable painter amongst diplomats and aristocracy.
Only one of Delacroix’s paintings was not purchased by the state: The Death of Sardanapalus, painted in 1827.
The story of the last Assyrian king has featured time and time again in mythology and legend, most often to illustrate notions of corruption, sloth and debauchery. Sardanapalus is believed to have reigned around the 7th century BC and was notorious for his hedonistic lifestyle.
Delacroix’s painting is lavish in its treatment of colour and texture, depicting Sardanapalus lying in his stately chamber at the moment his armies have been conquered by the enemy. The scene is grotesque, full of writhing naked concubines, servants and even Sardanapalus’s prize horses, all of whom are about to be slain, in order to die with their defeated king.
The free, expressive brushwork and the lush treatment of this nightmarish subject matter contrasted greatly with the painterly norms of the day. Delacroix had eclipsed Neoclassicism, which routinely tended towards orderly form and a sense of realism. His composition is loose and free-flowing, far removed from the grid-like precision of his predecessors.
But The Death of Sardanapalus is far more than a simple exercise in storytelling. For one, it exemplifies Orientalism, a theme that was heavily prevalent in 19th-century painting. At the time, Napoleon was taking an active interest in the efforts of the Ottoman government to reform and modernise itself and art became a propaganda tool, a means by which the culture and history of the Orient could be diminished, substantiating the ambitions of the French to control the region.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), for instance, a painting of a concubine within a harem, encouraged the viewer to associate untethered sexual misconduct and corruption with the Orient. However, as a proselytising device, the work is undone by its own hypocrisy: the concubine – apparently representative of Eastern culture – is, in fact, European, with pale, translucent skin.
In comparison, Delacroix treated the notion of the Orient with respect and neutrality. Unlike many artists of the time – who, despite painting their Oriental scenes with an almost anthropological sense of realism, had never left Europe – before he embarked on Sardanapalus, Delacroix travelled to Morocco, Algeria and Spain. The sketches he made there covered all areas of life: market places, landscapes, seascapes, women and children dressed in traditional attire, families gathered in their living rooms. Delacroix seems to have developed a childlike enthusiasm for discovering how others lived, in a manner completely alien to the stuffy formality of the Salon de Paris.
But, though it seems at first glance to support the political expectations of the era, in fact, The Death of Sardanapalus undermines them. Instead of demonstrating the flaws of the Orient, it diminished the relevance of sovereignty in a France in which the monarchy had only recently been restored, because the character of Sardanapalus reaffirmed the link between royalty and chaos in the French consciousness. Many noted, for instance, that the mighty king remained detached and apathetic in the midst of the horrors surrounding him.
Predictably, the painting was very poorly received. Delacroix had fallen out of favour with the Salon, the brutality and cold-bloodedness of this piece perhaps hitting too close to home, politically speaking. Because its potential for indoctrinating the masses amounted to very little, The Death of Sardanapalus was not acquired by the authorities, and remained hidden from view in the artist’s studio thereafter.
The picture was only brought to light again when the Louvre purchased it, in 1921, more than 50 years after Delacroix had died. Now, it is simply read as a painting of a minor fable. Nevertheless, the work itself is such a tremendous achievement that it transcends any political baggage it may have once carried.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Cézanne's genre-defying classic that both appalled and inspired

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/large-bathers-cezannes-genre-defying-classic-appalled-inspired/

The Large Bathers

It is hard to imagine that Cézanne’s paintings were considered disturbingly ugly during his lifetime.When his dealer, the powerful Ambroise Vollard, placed one of his Bather paintings prominently in his gallery window, it drew a hostile response.
Even the progressive critic Charles Morice was appalled, stating: “Cézanne’s paintings alarm the public and delight artists – all of the public, but few of the artists.” A more conservative commentator noted that: “Cézanne never was able to create what can be called a ‘picture’, in truth.”
Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France. Vollard described Cézanne’s mother as, “vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence”, a personality trait that the artist would later acquire himself.
Cézanne’s father was a lawyer and successful banker, and encouraged his son to follow the same career path. Although reluctant, Cézanne acquiesced to his father’s wishes, attending the University of Aix Law School for three years, while receiving drawing lessons in the evenings.
Deciding that law was not a profession he wanted to pursue, he left for Paris in 1861. Cézanne’s rejection of his father’s ambitions led to a troubled relationship between the two. 
Fortunately, however, his father came around to his career choice eventually and Cézanne was financially dependent on him for many years. He received a monthly allowance of 100 francs, and a large inheritance following his mother’s death in 1897. (His father died in 1886.)

Cézanne was a self-taught artist. Arriving in Paris, he hoped to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, but was denied a place – twice. As a result, he had to find a more conventional way of improving his technique, and spent hours in the Louvre copying the great masters, such as Titian, Rubens and Michelangelo.
Soon he was able to join the Académie Suisse, a studio that, for a modest monthly fee, offered students the opportunity to draw from a live model. Here he met fellow aspiring painters Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro.
Cézanne continued with his independent studies and worked diligently to exhibit his paintings at the prestigious Paris Salon, but his work was rejected every time. These submissions came at a price – a price Cézanne was unable to pay on his own. It meant he had to travel back regularly to Aix to secure further funding from his dubious father.
His friend Pissarro encouraged Cézanne to consider trying a brighter palette and livelier, more delicate brushwork. During this period, Cézanne honed his approach, applying repeated exploratory brushstrokes to his pictures. He also began work on a vast series of paintings of the female and male nude, portrayed either singly or in groups, within a landscape setting. Many bore the hallmarks of Titian and Poussin. 

Cinq Baigneuses Sous Des Arbres by Paul Cezanne 

He also began work on a vast series of paintings of the female and male nude, portrayed either singly or in groups, within a landscape setting. Many bore the hallmarks of Titian and Poussin.

They were mostly painted from memory and using his imagination rather than actual observation. Among them were the three wonderful Bather paintings. The Large Bathers, now at the Philadelphia Museum, was the most resolved of the three, and is today considered one the greatest achievements of modern art. Cézanne worked on this picture for a remarkable seven years, between 1898 and 1905, but he still considered it unfinished.
All three versions of the scene share similar characteristics – the merging of the bathers’s geometric forms with the background, the lack of narrative content, the parallel composition and the amorphous quality of the bathers’ expressionless faces.
It was these distortions that contemporary viewers found unappealing, even though the notion of rawness had become a focus of the avant-garde painting of the time.
This attitude persisted well after Cézanne’s death, reaching a climax in 1937 when the Philadelphia Museum purchased The Large Bathers from a leading American art collector and critic, for $110,000. Criticised by the press as a “scandalous waste of such a vast sum”, the museum was forced to justify the purchase, describing the painting as having the “feel of an unanswered question”, a testament to the “anxiety” Picasso famously declared to be the source of his great interest in Cézanne. The Philadelphia Record pointed out that this money might have been put to better use helping the 40,000 Philadelphian residents without bathtubs, or put towards urban renewal programmes.

The Large Bathers

Cézanne had wanted the painting to defy all genre and style, and to be a timeless work of art. It certainly became an inspiration for some, particularly Picasso and other cubists.

Henri Matisse commented: “At critical moments in my artistic adventure it gave me courage; I drew from it my faith and endurance.” Both Matisse and Picasso agreed that Cézanne “is the father of us all”.
The last decade of Cézanne’s life was mostly spent alone in his studio in Aix, alienated from most of his friends and family due to the onset of diabetes and bouts of severe depression.
In 1906, he was caught in a storm while working in the field. Persistent as ever, he continued for another two hours under heavy showers before finally deciding to return home. The following day the model that he was currently painting called for help, as the artist appeared faint; he was put to his bed and never left – Cézanne had contracted pneumonia, dying a few days later, aged 67.
Like a number of our greatest artists, he barely enjoyed a single day of true recognition of his genius.

Charles Saatchi’s Great Masterpieces: the essence of fleeting Rococo frivolity before disaster struck

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-essence-fleeting-rococo/

High spirits: Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, painted in 1767

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) is most renowned for his saccharine, congenial depictions of the upper classes at play.
He was undoubtedly at his prime in the late Rococo era, a time synonymous with hedonistic freedom, and the pursuit of all things pleasurable and aesthetically agreeable.
The style emerged in France during the mid-18th century as a reflection of the gaudy embellishments that were then so popular in architecture and furniture. They were considered exceptionally stylish by the bourgeoisie and newly wealthy, who, as they surrounded themselves with all that was resplendent, sought paintings that demonstrated their refinement.
The pinnacle of full-blown Rococo style was the extraordinary Palace of Versailles, which came to be seen as the epitome of decadence and vulgar grandeur.
But then, the French Revolution arrived – bringing with it a brutal finale to the era of opulence. 

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Why Francisco de Zurbarán is the most overlooked great master

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-francisco-de-zurbaran-overlooked/

Martyrdom of St Serapion, 1628, by Francisco de Zurbaran

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) is the most overlooked of the great masters. Outside Spain he is barely known, and generally neglected. Why? Primarily, because he specialised in painting monks. In fact, virtually all of his pictures were ecclesiastical, produced for monasteries and populated by clergy, saints, and other religious figures. The paintings simply lack the overwhelming impact of masterpieces by the Spanish titans: Velásquez, Goya, and El Greco.
The dark mysticism of Zurbarán’s work was appealing during a time of great religious conflict. In artistic terms, this meant dispensing with the extravagances of baroque and mannerism. They were considered too much of the flesh, full of sensuality, nudity, lust, and depicting Old Testament fables rather than New Testament truths. 

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: when a family scene was an act of rebellion

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-family-scene-act-rebellion/

 

Bold: Woman and a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875, also known as The Stroll 

At his secondary school, Monet (1840-1926) discovered that his charcoal caricatures were popular, and that he could sell each one for 20 francs. He soon decided he might do better taking drawing and painting lessons, and becoming an artist, rather than following his father’s wish that he join the family grocery business.

Like many artists, Monet moved to Paris early on in his career. There he saw artists sitting in the Louvre in front of the Old Masters, painstakingly copying and trying to learn from these revered works. But instead, Monet chose to sit by the window and paint what he saw outside. He began to create his own approach, working outside en plein air, a technique he had learned from his tutor, the artist Eugène Boudin. It was Monet’s ability to master the effects of light on his subject that would define his career.
Looking at the serene pictures he created, you would be forgiven for thinking that he lived a very quiet life, spent mostly on the banks of ponds filled with lily pads, or at picnics on idyllic beaches with friends. For the most part, you would be correct, but Monet also enjoyed life as a vigorous young artist, and threw himself into the swing of Parisian life, taking advantage of all it had to offer.
He viewed art school with the same disdain that he felt for those artists he had seen in the Louvre, trying to copy the masters. Disillusioned with both the way art was being taught and the work that was being created around him, he found inspiration instead within his circle of friends, which by now included fellow artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Together, they shunned conventional methods and subjects, and bold new ways of making art began to take shape.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: how Giorgio de Chirico's dreamscapes inspired Surrealism

 Detail of Giorgio de Chirico's Gare Montparnasse 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-giorgio-de-chiricos-dreamscapes/


Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was the idol of the Surrealists. His invention of “metaphysical painting” in 1910 transfixed the coming generation of artists – including Dalí, Magritte, Ernst, Man Ray – who were intrigued by dreamlike imagery.
Although de Chirico’s career spanned 70 years, the paintings he produced during that decade would remain his most significant. Sadly, he seemed to agree with this view, since he would eternally create new versions of this body of pictures, and routinely backdate them. His reputation, and the market for his art, suffered terribly.
It also hurt his role as a torchbearer for the Surrealists when he eventually tired of being courted by them. He wanted to distance himself, and referred to them as “the leaders of modernistic imbecility”. This did not sit well with their spiritual mentor, the influential André Breton.
De Chirico’s extraordinary painting Gare Montparnasse – The Melancholy of Departure (1914) refers neither to a specific place, nor to a particular view. It is more reminiscent of a theatrical set, an imaginary backdrop for an event drawn from his imagination, and certainly not a familiar cityscape.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: the dress and figure that were too much for Le Tout Paris

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/charles-saatchis-great-masterpieces-dress-andfigure-weretoo/

Detail of John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1884)

John sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye. If we can afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be quite a little artist.” After Sargent’s mother, herself a painter, wrote this note in 1867, his father agreed to enrol him in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence during his late teens. Until this point, Sargent (1856-1925) had received little formal education – his parents were convinced that he could obtain all the knowledge necessary in life from visiting museums and churches encountered during the family’s nomadic travels around Europe.Sargent continued his artistic career in Paris, where he was inspired to avoid preliminary sketching, and work directly on canvas. In 1879, Sargent submitted a portrait of his tutor to the Salon des Indépendants. It won an honourable mention, and his reputation as a portraitist began to grow. Sargent continued to enter a range of works to the Salon, but it was always his portraits that were the most warmly received. Soon, he began receiving regular portrait commissions, and his renown spread.
Sargent was thought to have exceptionally fine manners, a trait that was most helpful to him with patrons. Due to his popularity and his growing circle of clients, he was confident enough to set high portrait fees, and politely reject any unsuitable sitter. Things continued to go well for Sargent until his self-confidence led him to undertake a risky experiment: he exhibited his portrait of Madame Gautreau at the 1884 Salon.
Mme Gautreau was a Parisian socialite known for her elegance and glamour. She was pale-skinned and used lavender-coloured face and body powder to enhance her complexion. Sargent found her intoxicating and was determined to capture Gautreau’s “unpaintable beauty”. She was particularly admired for her hourglass figure – a feature Sargent would emphasise within his painting.
Used to being pursued by his clientele, now Sargent became the pursuer. “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty,” he wrote to a mutual acquaintance. “You might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.” Madame Gautreau had turned down many such requests, but after two years of pleading from Sargent, she finally agreed.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Raphael's tribute to the titans of two great civilisations

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Ever since The School of Athens was painted during the Italian High Renaissance in the early 16th century, it has confounded art historians and scholars. Dedicated to the role of philosophical debate, Raphael presents the quest for knowledge as a transformative force in mankind’s evolution. 

His father was a prominent court painter to the Duke of Urbino, teaching his boy basic painting techniques from a young age. He also educated his son in the principles of humanist thinking, and the works of the classicists. Raphael was 11 when his father died in 1494, leaving him to manage the art workshop.
Even as a teenager, he was considered a far more accomplished painter than his father, and was soon noted as one of the finest artists in Urbino, which was considered to be the epicentre of cultural achievement at the time.
Raphael was quickly chosen for a commission at an important church in the neighbouring province of Perugia. By the age of 21, he had moved to Florence, where he was immediately struck by the magnificent works surrounding him on all sides – by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Masaccio.
They seemed to Raphael to have achieved a higher level of mastery in composition than he had ever seen, and he studied their painting in intimate detail, in order to develop a more intricate, expressive style.

Leonardo’s ability to portray human emotion transfixed him, and he quickly began to introduce tender expressions and sublime colouring into his own work. In the same way, Michelangelo’s ability to make his figures interact would dynamically influence Raphael’s use of light to animate his paintings, giving his forms their dimensionality.
Raphael’s superb Madonna of the Pinks can be seen as a clear homage to Leonardo. Indeed, his entire series of Madonnas drew tremendous acclaim, particularly from the leading forces of the Renaissance.

Charles Saatchi's masterpieces: how Goya rewrote the rule book of the female nude

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Francisco Goya (1746‑1828) was born when Spanish art was at a low ebb. The genius of the 17th‑century master Velázquez had been followed by generations of anaemic mediocrity.
As a teenager, Goya liked to spend his time sketching in the fields near Saragossa. One day, a passing monk, reciting his breviary, stumbled across the young artist making charcoal drawings. Struck by Goya’s aptitude, he immediately asked the boy to take him to speak to his parents. It didn’t take long to persuade them that Goya should enter an apprenticeship with a prominent studio. In all possibility, that fortuitous meeting awakened the latent brilliance of the artist and ushered in a renaissance in Spanish painting.
Goya was an intensely keen observer of humanity, using his brush and pencil to tell the vivid stories of the people of Spain, and the restless life of the city. His representations of women were numerous and all-encompassing: covens of witches, beautiful maidens, mistresses of powerful men, milkmaids, gipsies. None of these was more notorious than Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, The Naked Maja.
In this painting, made between 1797-1800, Goya rejected the traditional, stoically frigid representations of the female nude. Instead, inspired by Titian’s audacious Venus of Urbino that had so horrified 16th-century Italy, Goya chose to abandon the suggestion that he was innocently portraying a goddess. He wanted anyone looking at his naked model to be fully aware that she was a woman of the lower classes, a maja, a person considered a commoner in Spanish society. This was no Divinity basking upon the canvas, rather a woman of the people with a highly sexualised, almost aggressive gaze, staring back at the viewer directly and provocatively.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: how Matisse made flatness fabulous

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The Red Studio, painted in 1911 by Henri Matisse 

Trained as a lawyer, Henri Matisse discovered in a somewhat unconventional way that he was fated to be an artist. When he was 21, and suffering from a severe bout of appendicitis, his mother bought him some art supplies to relieve his boredom as he lay in bed. He started painting, and, “from the moment I held the box of colours in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a wild animal.”
Matisse’s mother encouraged him to not adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather to rely on his emotions, and attempt to express them powerfully. Throughout his long life (he died aged 84, in 1954) he remained forever faithful to his work, even warning his wife, Amélie Parayre: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.”

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: Egon Schiele's brush with infamy

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Detail of 'Self-Portrait with Physalis' (1912) by Egon Schiele Credit: Bridgeman

Egon Schiele had a brief, calamitous life, dead at 28. The “Cursed Artist” found each day more turbulent than the last, until he succumbed to the Spanish Flu pandemic that swept across Europe, reaching Vienna in 1920.
Growing up, he watched his father’s mental health deteriorate, a sister die aged 10, his mother lose a daughter at birth and then another a year later – it was a morbidly bleak upbringing for an already hypersensitive young man. In his painting Dead Mother, completed when he was 20, he was clearly still traumatised by his mother’s suffering, creating the moving image of a parent seen with her stillborn child as she lies with the foetus in a pool of amniotic fluid.
In 1906, Schiele had enrolled in Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, where his gifts quickly became apparent. His professor, Christian Griepenkerl, was asked about the boy’s abilities, and replied: “Does he have talent? Yes, too much. He messes up the entire class.”
Soon to be seen as a natural member of the Vienna Secession movement, Schiele had become a protégé of its leader, the great Gustav Klimt. But unlike Klimt, whose paintings had a radiant grandeur to them, Schiele wanted to emphasise raw expression. He was particularly inspired by the young female form and, conveniently, his sister allowed him to study the evolution of her body. A revelatory painting from this time was Portrait of Gerti Schiele in which she is seen against a stark, blank background, monochrome and unadorned, the graphic power of his drawing translated dramatically in paint.

After Schiele met 17-year-old Valerie Neuzil, one of Klimt’s models, she became his mistress, as well as a muse for many of his greatest portraits. Routinely named “Wally”, she appears in a number of his psychologically charged works. Schiele’s efforts were starting to be recognised by his peers, who were struck by his sombre palette, irregular contours and dark symbolism. Captivated by the immediacy of drawing, he still regarded it as his primary art form, and this translated into paintings with an emphasis on contour and striking draughtsmanship.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: a sharp but serene vision of the battle of the sexes

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 Triumphant: Judith with the Head of Holofernes (detail) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530

Lucas Cranach the Elder was a pre-eminent German painter, a canny businessman, and a public relations maestro, who bestowed his own luxury-brand logo on all his works in the symbol of a serpent.
He lived at a time when depicting religious subjects required treading a thin line. Art had become central to the prevailing spiritual unrest spreading throughout Europe in the early 16th century. Waves of ferocious anti-Catholic feeling resulted in many altars and church frescoes being destroyed as idolatrous. Art was repurposed, with a newly austere visual language that was intended as a tool for publicising protestant values.
As a close friend of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, Cranach was at the heart of this movement. His paintings of religious scenes and his portraits of the mighty became fundamental in establishing a new vision of Christianity that provided a direct representation of the gospel, doing away with what its followers saw as heretical Catholic ostentation.
Cranach was also instrumental in flooding Europe with imposing portraits of Luther himself, and produced engravings for the front of the theologian’s pamphlets. Cranach was trained in engraving, and had recently seen it grow in stature following the invention of the printing press. He thought carefully about how to execute such images, given that they would be reproduced many times.
Cranach’s woodcut illustrations of Christ and his apostles as impoverished prophets were deliberately set against the pomp and materialism of the Pope. It was a swingeing, incendiary attack on the Catholic Church, and widely distributed across many nations.
Luther was a valuable friend for an artist at the time. His doctrine made depictions of holy subjects acceptable, provided it was emphasised that these were just images, and not objects of worship in themselves.

Charles Saatchi's Great Masterpieces: the painting that enraged critics and revolutionised art

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 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 (oil on canvas) by Picasso, Pablo Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York/DACS 

Picasso was never alone. He lived among wives, casual lovers, favourite muses and long-term mistresses. His many passionate relationships made for a turbulent life, both for himself and for his women. So turbulent, in fact, that two of the women committed suicide, and another two suffered mental breakdowns.
His 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicts none of Picasso’s lovers; the five naked women were all prostitutes. The picture was originally titled The Brothel of Avignon and included two men, clients of the young ladies. Picasso painted over the male figures, and had the five women gaze boldly, even menacingly, at the viewer. The figures on the left were inspired by prehistoric art, and the two on the right by African carved wooden masks.
Breaking with the traditions of European painting, Picasso abandoned perspective in favour of a splintered, direct picture plane. That, and its raw, slashing  paint-strokes made the picture  not merely controversial, but downright inflammatory.