Monsieur Vénus

Lionel Wendt, [title not known]  c.1933–6

Natalia Goncharova, Linen  1913

This painting conveys the bustle of a commercial laundry. The two sides of the work are divided between traditionally male (shirts, collars and cuffs) and female (lace, blouses and aprons) items. This suggests an intimate relationship between two people. The text interspersed within the composition reflects Goncharova’s collaboration with transrational poets on the designs and illustration of artists books. These books brought together images and text with nonlinear styles that produced new, unexpected meanings.

Gallery label, September 2024

Marie Laurencin, The Fan  c.1919

Laurencin’s paintings often depict a world peopled exclusively by women. Shown in pairs or groups, they offer a vision of female intimacy and autonomy. The pairing of framed images shown in The Fan is ambiguous. It has been suggested that the woman in the oval frame is the artist herself. The identity of the other woman, however, is uncertain: is she a picture, or a reflection in a mirror? Laurencin created a series of 10 etchings of women with fans to illustrate a collection of poems dedicated to her and written by her friends. It was published in 1922 as a limited edition titled L’Eventail (The Fan).

Gallery label, September 2024

Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, Untitled  1928–9, printed later

In the late 1920s the Themersons began to experiment with camera-less photography. Here, they have used light, liquid, and in some cases branches of plants, to create abstract images. Photograms are made by laying objects directly on photo-sensitive surfaces and exposing them to light. In this case, Franciszka positioned objects on a glass shelf and moved the lights above. Stefan, lying underneath the glass shelf used a camera to photograph the arrangement from below. This process allowed the Themersons to create multiple prints of the abstract compositions.

Gallery label, January 2025

Sylvia Sleigh, The Bride (Lawrence Alloway)  1949

Here Sleigh paints her partner, art critic Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990), dressed as ‘Hetty Remington’. Hetty was Alloway’s alter ego, who Sleigh described as ‘a mythological character in our love game’. For the portrait, Sleigh picks a private and enclosed setting and pale pastel colours. Alloway’s clothing references the styles worn by powerful women in court in Tudor England. The work offers a touching glimpse into the couple’s intimate life. Too transgressive to exhibit until decades afterwards, this portrait documents the fluid gender play explored by Sleigh and her partner.

Gallery label, September 2024

Leonor Fini, Little Hermit Sphinx  1948

Fini’s paintings depict women as complex and powerful beings. Little Hermit Sphinx shows a surreal and unsettling scene. A sphinx sits at the threshold of a decrepit building with a human organ hanging above its head. The sphinx is a mythological creature that is part lion and part woman, with the wings of a bird. In 1947 Fini underwent a hysterectomy. The bleeding flesh above and the broken egg below the sphinx might point to the artist coming to terms with infertility. Here the Sphinx assumes a genderless state, becoming Fini’s alter ego and a recurrent symbol of feminine empowerment in her work.

Gallery label, September 2024

Vanessa Bell, The Tub  1917

In October 1916 Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the writer David Garnett moved into Charleston Farmhouse, on the South Downs in Sussex. This unusually large painting was intended for the garden room of the new house. It was never installed, and the artist kept it folded up. It was only rediscovered with the revival of enthusiasm for the art of Bloomsbury in the 1970s.

Bathers were painted by many of the French painters Bell admired, including Cézanne, Degas and Matisse. Originally the figure was partially clothed; there is a photograph of an earlier version of the painting in the display case in this room.

Gallery label, September 2004

Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus  1937

This artwork is inspired by a poem by Roman poet Ovid where young Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Having realised that his love could never be reciprocated, Narcissus pined away, turning into a flower. Dalí wrote a homonymous poem to be exhibited alongside the work. This literary component adds additional layers of meaning to the painting. Recent scholarship suggests that it evokes the emotional turmoil that followed the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca (1898– 1936) – with whom Dalí had an intimate relationship – and the strengthening of the artist’s bond with his wife, Gala.

Gallery label, September 2024

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers at Moritzburg  1909–26

This painting shows Kirchner’s artist friends and their models bathing in a secluded woodland spot at the Moritzburg ponds outside Dresden, Germany. Kirchner and his friends were members of the Brücke group. Inspired by thinkers such as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Brücke artists promoted cultural renewal, a communal lifestyle and a cult of nature by rejecting tradition. Such notions also fuelled the right-wing ideology that culminated in the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, when ideas around health and the body were used as a tool for the perpetuation of racial purity.

Gallery label, September 2024

Max Ernst, Pietà or Revolution by Night  1923

Ernst was a surrealist artist. Inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) theory of the unconscious, surrealism used irrational images to portray the working of the human mind. Here Ernst replaces the popular Renaissance scene of Madonna cradling the body of Christ (known as Pietà) with an image of the artist himself, held by his father. Ernst paints his father following the traditional iconography of the Madonna, Mother of Christ. He subverts the original scene, showing instead a father figure in a caring role traditionally associated with women and mothers.

Gallery label, September 2024

Jacques Lipchitz, Portrait of Gertrude Stein  1938

Louise Bourgeois, Amoeba  1963–5, cast 1984

The idea for Amoeba came from the artist’s memories of the tadpoles she played with in a river near her childhood home. The roughly-modelled organic form of the sculpture resembles a living creature, and the large swelling may be an allusion to pregnancy. Herself a mother, Bourgeois has made many works that explore themes of pregnancy and motherhood. ‘For me, sculpture is the body’, she has said. ‘My body is my sculpture’.

Gallery label, November 2005

Dorothea Tanning, Nue couchée  1969–70

This is one of Tanning’s soft sculptures that evoke bodily forms. The artist described them as ‘living materials becoming living sculptures, their life span something like ours’. The sculptures are made out of a combination of textiles stuffed with wool and various objects. Here Tanning uses table tennis balls to create the suggestion of vertebrae protruding from the fabric. Nue couchée straddles the divide between object and being, animate and inanimate. Tanning resisted interpretations of her work focused on gender and sexuality. Instead, these soft sculptures are expressions of the artist’s imaginative fantasy world.

Gallery label, September 2024

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

Brassaï, The Urchin Bijou, Bar de la Lune  1932, printed 1960–9

The Urchin Bijou, Bar de la Lune 1932 is a medium-size black and white photograph taken by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï that depicts an older woman sitting alone in a bar. She wears a hat bearing a flower, a coat with a fur collar and a patterned skirt, and although the woman’s clothes have the initial appearance of glamour, closer inspection shows they are somewhat tattered. Her face is very pale, accented only by shadows under her eyes and dark painted lips, and she wears multiple strings of pearls around her neck, on her wrists and twisted around her fingers. The woman sits on a padded bench that runs behind two tables made from dark wood, and her left hand rests on an object resembling silver snuff box or cigarette case that lies on one of the tables. On the other table, in the left of the composition, is a small wine glass and a stack of two white plates or ashtrays. The woman’s right arm is bent so that her hand supports her chin and she looks directly towards the camera.

Lionel Wendt, [title not known]  c.1933–8

Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, Untitled  1928, printed later

In the late 1920s the Themersons began to experiment with camera-less photography. Here, they have used light, liquid, and in some cases branches of plants, to create abstract images. Photograms are made by laying objects directly on photo-sensitive surfaces and exposing them to light. In this case, Franciszka positioned objects on a glass shelf and moved the lights above. Stefan, lying underneath the glass shelf used a camera to photograph the arrangement from below. This process allowed the Themersons to create multiple prints of the abstract compositions.

Gallery label, January 2025

Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, Untitled  1930, printed later

In the late 1920s the Themersons began to experiment with camera-less photography. Here, they have used light, liquid, and in some cases branches of plants, to create abstract images. Photograms are made by laying objects directly on photo-sensitive surfaces and exposing them to light. In this case, Franciszka positioned objects on a glass shelf and moved the lights above. Stefan, lying underneath the glass shelf used a camera to photograph the arrangement from below. This process allowed the Themersons to create multiple prints of the abstract compositions.

Gallery label, January 2025

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Dr Rosa Schapire  1919

Schmidt-Rottluff made several portraits of Dr Rosa Schapire (1874–1954). Trained as an art historian, she was one of the first supporters of the Brücke group, of which Schmidt-Rottluff was a founder member. Both this work and Woman with a Bag were incorporated in the decorative scheme, which Schmidt-Rottluff carried out in 1921 for her apartment in Hamburg. She came to England in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi persecution, bringing with her a large collection of Schmidt-Rottluff’s work.

Gallery label, July 2008