Studio Practice

Duncan Grant, Interior at Gordon Square  c.1915

This painting shows the front and back rooms of 46 Gordon Square in London. Grant lived there with fellow artist, Vanessa Bell. The scene features a view of a long sofa, with two windows beyond, one in the centre of the picture and one to the right. The green square in the background shows the view into the square and trees beyond. Immediately through the door are possibly the overlapping backs of paintings stacked against the wall. The composition is made up of layered geometric shapes. This shows that Grant was familiar with cubism, the new art movement that was developing in France. Cubist artists are known for bringing different viewpoints together in the same picture. This results in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

Gallery label, August 2020

Georges Braque, Mandora  1909–10

Braque’s interest in collecting musical instruments is captured in this painting. Here he depicts a small stringed instrument called a madora. The painting is made up of different geometric shapes, making it appear fragmented. This style suggests a sense of rhythm, matching the musical subject of the painting. Braque explained that he liked to include instruments in his cubist works. ‘In the first place because I was surrounded by them, and secondly because their plasticity, their volumes, related to my particular concept of still life’.

Gallery label, August 2020

Pierre Bonnard, The Bowl of Milk  c.1919

Bonnard painted this work in the south of France. He moved there during the First World War with his partner Marthe de Méligny, pictured here. This view is of the room they rented. Light reflected from the sea pours through the balcony window. The strong light leaves many details in shadow, including de Méligny’s face and the cat awaiting its milk. Preparatory drawings show Bonnard testing a variety of details and poses before he brought them together in the final painting.

Gallery label, February 2020

Dod Procter, Morning  1926

In 1922, Procter began to paint a series of simple, monumental portraits of young women that she knew. Emphasising the fall of light across the figures, Proctor gave them a powerful presence. This painting features Cissie Barnes, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a fisherman from Newlyn in Cornwall. This village was home to Procter for most of her working life. This painting was voted 'Picture of the Year' at the 1927 Summer Exhibition, a yearly show at the Royal Academy in London. It was bought for the nation by the Daily Mail newspaper. The popularity of the painting led to its being displayed in New York, followed by a tour of Britain.

Gallery label, August 2020

Christian Schad, Self-Portrait  1927

Schad claimed that 'no-one is entirely free from narcissism.' This self-portrait is loaded with symbols connected to identity and appearance. The artist is positioned in front of the woman, but only partially conceals her nakedness. In contrast to the naked woman, Schad wears a transparent shirt. A narcissus flower, indicating vanity, leans towards the artist. The woman’s face is scarred with a sfregio, a wound inflicted as a punishment by Neapolitan criminals. The work contains violent and erotic suggestions. Despite this, Schad said, 'it is not about the aftermath of heat and passion but is meant as an allegory of narcissism.’

Gallery label, August 2020

Georges Braque, Glass on a Table  1909–10

Traditional painting often presents a single viewpoint. Artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso explored new ways of representing reality. They brought different views together in the same picture. The resulting paintings appear fragmented and abstracted. They imitate the fleeting nature of sight. In this painting of a glass and pears on a table, these different perspectives might appear to obscure the subject matter. But Braque believed that by breaking up familiar items and re-ordering them, he could get closer to a true likeness of the object.

Gallery label, July 2019

Georges Braque, Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece  1911

A horizontal clarinet lies on top of a mantelpiece at the centre of this playful, geometric work. In front stands a bottle with the characters RHU, the first three letters of the French word for rum. The word VALSE (waltz) indicates sheet music, reinforced by fragments of treble and bass clefs found throughout the image. A scrolled form in the lower right could represent part of the mantelpiece, or a violin-head. Braque painted this during a summer he spent with Picasso in the Pyranees. They worked together depicting similar scenes and objects in the same style.

Gallery label, April 2022

Meraud Guevara, Seated Woman with Small Dog  c.1939

The woman in this painting dominates the steep, angled space. She would not fit in the interior if she were to stand. This creates a sense of uncertainty for the viewer. Guevara made a number of precise and realistic paintings of women, in which they dominate the space. This gives the viewer a strange and uneasy perspective. Here, a sense of mystery is suggested by the imaginary view. This is achieved by placing the room high above the landscape, the open doorway behind, and the strange, but deliberate, flash of orange beside the door.

Gallery label, April 2021

Georges Braque, Guitar and Jug  1927

Braque used traditional artists’ props such as guitars, jugs and glasses to experiment with composition. The familiar objects in Guitar and Jug are presented in sombre colours of brown and grey. He uses fluid lines to create the objects, their softness set against a rigorous structure. The items may also have symbolic meaning. The guitar may suggest artistic harmony. The apples, branch and glass could celebrate the abundance of nature. Braque’s interest in depicting a variety of materials and textures is also clear. In this work he includes wood, glass, fabric, organic elements and wallpaper.

Gallery label, August 2020

Henri Matisse, Back III  c.1916–17, cast 1955–6

The Backs were Matisse’s largest sculptures. Over twenty years he progressively refined the original pose, based on a woman leaning on a fence, until he achieved a massive simplicity. Matisse’s decision to show the back view of a woman on such a monumental scale was unorthodox. By concealing her face, he avoided the complexities of visual engagement between artist and model. This helped him to consider the nude as an arrangement of forms that he could simplify and stylise.

In the final sculpture, the modelling of flesh has given way to the massing of androgynous bulk and the gently curved spine has been replaced by an abstracted plait. Although Back I had been exhibited in 1913, the series remained almost unknown until 1949–50 when the plaster Backs I, III and IV appeared in exhibitions in Paris and Lausanne.

Back II was only rediscovered after Matisse’s death, while an even more naturalistic first version is now only known from a photograph. All were cast in bronze after his death.

Gallery label, October 2016

Sir Anthony Caro, Table Piece CCLXVI  1975

Table Piece CCLXVI is constructed on a human scale. At just over two metres wide it is comparable to the width of a person’s outstretched arms. Caro has observed that: ‘all sculpture is to do with the physical – all sculpture takes its bearings from the fact that we live inside our bodies and that our size and stretch and strength is what it is’.

Gallery label, October 2016

Marie Laurencin, Portraits (Marie Laurencin, Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog Coco)  1915

Laurencin painted this portrait using simplified forms and a limited palette of blue, pink and grey. The artist was part of a group of cubist painters working in Paris around 1911. She chose, however, not to follow the abstracted treatment of the body that many of her cubist friends adopted. This picture was painted in Madrid in 1915. Laurencin moved to Spain with her husband, German painter Otto von Wätjen, following the outbreak of the First World War. It depicts Cecilia, the daughter of the Spanish painter Federico de Madrazo, and the artist herself, shown on the left.

Gallery label, September 2019

Meredith Frampton, Portrait of a Young Woman  1935

Frampton painted the sitter, Margaret Austin-Jones, standing next to a cello. He noted that, as she was very musical, the cello was an 'appropriate symbol.' Frampton said that he made this painting 'to celebrate an assembly of objects... beautiful in their own right’. Frampton's mother made the dress Margaret is wearing in the painting. The white vase on the table in the background was designed by Frampton. This painting relates to full-length portraits of women, associated with the work of earlier artists. However the clarity and precision of Frampton’s painting style gives this work a modern feeling.

Gallery label, August 2020

David Smith, Home of the Welder  1945

Home of the Welder was made shortly after the Second World War. The work reflects Smith’s personal circumstances. He had just been released from his wartime job as a welder, which he believed had restricted his creative work. The various elements in the sculpture relate to his dreams and frustrations at the time. It can be seen as Smith's coded diary. The millstone was identified by Smith as representing his job as a welder. The images of women and children may reflect tensions in his first marriage, from which he did not have children.

Gallery label, August 2020

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande)  1909

This sculpture is of Fernande Olivier, an artist and model. Olivier and Picasso were in a relationship for seven years after meeting in Paris in 1904. A number of works Picasso made during this time were inspired by Olivier. The flat, squared surface of Head of a Woman reflects the cubist style he explored from 1907–09. Picasso made two plaster casts of this sculpture, from which at least sixteen bronze examples were cast.

Gallery label, November 2019

Christian Schad, Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove  1929

The people in this painting directly return our gaze. Schad met the two sitters at a funfair in north Berlin in 1929. They were performers in a sideshow act there. Their roles involved displaying their bodies as ‘exotic’ or ‘other’ to funfair visitors. We might ask whether the painting is critical of this objectification. It could also be seen as perpetuating the voyeurism and discrimination experienced by Agosta and Rasha. Schad's commitment to painting reality reflects his association with the New Objectivity. This artistic movement combined social criticism with a near-photographic realism.

Gallery label, August 2020

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life  1946

Morandi’s still life features a number of household objects. He often included the same selection of familiar items in his works. He kept a supply of vases, bottles and jars in his studio to use in his still life paintings. In this work, the objects lose their domestic purpose, becoming sculptural objects. Through repeated studies of the same items, Morandi creates a sense of timelessness. His use of earthy and muted colours was inspired by his native Bologna in northern Italy. This connects the artist's paintings to his own life and surroundings.

Gallery label, August 2020

Henri Matisse, Back I  c.1909–10, cast 1955–6

The Backs were Matisse’s largest sculptures. Over twenty years he progressively refined the original pose, based on a woman leaning on a fence, until he achieved a massive simplicity. Matisse’s decision to show the back view of a woman on such a monumental scale was unorthodox. By concealing her face, he avoided the complexities of visual engagement between artist and model. This helped him to consider the nude as an arrangement of forms that he could simplify and stylise.

In the final sculpture, the modelling of flesh has given way to the massing of androgynous bulk and the gently curved spine has been replaced by an abstracted plait. Although Back I had been exhibited in 1913, the series remained almost unknown until 1949–50 when the plaster Backs I, III and IV appeared in exhibitions in Paris and Lausanne.

Back II was only rediscovered after Matisse’s death, while an even more naturalistic first version is now only known from a photograph. All were cast in bronze after his death.

Gallery label, October 2016

Henri Matisse, Back IV  1930, cast 1955–6

The Backs were Matisse’s largest sculptures. Over twenty years he progressively refined the original pose, based on a woman leaning on a fence, until he achieved a massive simplicity. Matisse’s decision to show the back view of a woman on such a monumental scale was unorthodox. By concealing her face, he avoided the complexities of visual engagement between artist and model. This helped him to consider the nude as an arrangement of forms that he could simplify and stylise.

In the final sculpture, the modelling of flesh has given way to the massing of androgynous bulk and the gently curved spine has been replaced by an abstracted plait. Although Back I had been exhibited in 1913, the series remained almost unknown until 1949–50 when the plaster Backs I, III and IV appeared in exhibitions in Paris and Lausanne.

Back II was only rediscovered after Matisse’s death, while an even more naturalistic first version is now only known from a photograph. All were cast in bronze after his death.

Gallery label, October 2016

Henri Matisse, Back II  c.1913–14, cast 1955–6

The Backs were Matisse’s largest sculptures. Over twenty years he progressively refined the original pose, based on a woman leaning on a fence, until he achieved a massive simplicity. Matisse’s decision to show the back view of a woman on such a monumental scale was unorthodox. By concealing her face, he avoided the complexities of visual engagement between artist and model. This helped him to consider the nude as an arrangement of forms that he could simplify and stylise.

In the final sculpture, the modelling of flesh has given way to the massing of androgynous bulk and the gently curved spine has been replaced by an abstracted plait. Although Back I had been exhibited in 1913, the series remained almost unknown until 1949–50 when the plaster Backs I, III and IV appeared in exhibitions in Paris and Lausanne.

Back II was only rediscovered after Matisse’s death, while an even more naturalistic first version is now only known from a photograph. All were cast in bronze after his death.

Gallery label, October 2016

Pablo Picasso, Dish of Pears  1936

The dishes of pears in this still life are painted in a flat, graphic style. The white area behind the fruit was added as the final layer of the painting. It creates a sense of space behind the pears instead of a flat background of colour. Thick black lines separate the different elements in the painting. The result is an almost abstract pattern of colours and shapes. Picasso painted still life subjects throughout his career and in a range of different styles.

Gallery label, September 2019

Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky, View from the Window, Vienna  1925

This painting depicts a view of roofs and facades seen from the artist’s fourth-floor flat in Vienna, where she lived during the first half of the 1920s. The cupola in the upper centre of the painting is part of the Johann Strauss Theatre, famous for its performances of light opera. Technically this painting makes a shift in the artist’s work. Previously she had applied paint in dabs which created a mottled effect. This work is painted with rather freer brush strokes. The elongated vertical format is characteristic of von Motesiczky’s canvases of the period.

Gallery label, October 2016

Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky, Still Life with Sheep  1938

This was painted in a small hotel in Amsterdam. Von Motesiczky, and her mother, who were Jewish, fled to the city from their home in Vienna following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, in 1938. She posed objects on an ironing board, the most convenient surface available to her. The two eighteenth-century Chinese sheep ornaments were ‘familiar from our Viennese surroundings’. Von Motesiczky later recalled her motivation ‘to paint something beautiful...to paint and to dream’.

Gallery label, February 2022