Few artists suffer from the “I can do that” syndrome more than Kazimir Malevich. Born February 26, 1878, Malevich toured the many styles en vogue in the early twentieth century, from Post-Impressionism to Cubism before arriving at the style of Suprematism in his famous/infamous first work in that style Black Square (above, from 1915). Suprematism sprung from Malevich’s head almost fully formed, an aesthetic of pure color on color, devoid of the busy designs of the earlier styles he had toyed with. Such icons of modern art as Black Square represent an iconoclasm of sorts—a dismissal of design in a search for pure spirituality as expressed in painting. Looking through a gallery of Malevich’s pre-Suprematist works, you realize that Black Square is not the work of a man who couldn’t paint, but rather the work of a man who could no longer paint the same way and remain honest to himself.



Noah Charney’s novel, The Art Thief, imagines Malevich’s White on White (above, from 1918) stolen. (My review of The Art Thief is here.) Charney uses Malevich’s work to examine the nature of representation in art versus the long history of realism. Malevich’s goals are revolutionary—the Russian Revolution, to be precise. Living in that same utopian dreamworld inhabited by other Russian avant-garde artists, Malevich saw other artists such as Alexander Rodchenko celebrate the materialist renovation of their country through photography and ran the other way, seeking a spiritual language to reflect the tenor of the times itself rather than its embodiment in architecture and technology.



Like so many other artists of the Soviet period, however, Malevich’s work was first misunderstood and then severely punished. In his Self-Portrait (above, from 1933), Malevich paints himself like a prophet, speaking a new gospel to the Russian people. Like most prophets, unfortunately, he was honored in his own country with both ridicule and imprisonment. Just three years before this self-portrait, Malevich’s incendiary writings on art and society earned him months in a Soviet jail. Friends burned many of his works to avoid further punishment. Just two years after this self-portrait, Malevich dies from illness borne of the toll that prison had taken on him. Malevich’s rejection of the standard subject matter of art made him seem dangerous to the Soviet regime, which saw all modern art as bourgeois and elitist. In reality, works such as Black Square and White on White deny all elitism in their simplicity, reaching out to even the most unstudied viewer and asking them to look, to think, and, perhaps, to believe.

When contemporaries looked at the paintings of Winslow Homer, they imagined the artist as a rugged outdoorsman, a man who knew the hunting scenes he captured so beautifully first hand. Born February 24, 1836, Homer often disappointed those who met him with his bank clerk exterior, the complete opposite of the action hero they pictured. Although he painted many works of sharpshooters and soldiers at rest during his time as an artist-correspondent in the American Civil War, Homer’s most famous Civil War image may be The Veteran in a New Field (above, from 1865), in which a soldier freshly returned home immediately throws off his uniform and picks up the scythe in his fervent desire for a return to normalcy. Despite that change of scenery, the taint of death remains in the act of mowing down the grass, which mimics the grim reaper mowing down lives in the war. Homer often suffers under the label of “illustrator,” as if he simply reported the facts and nothing else. In works such as The Veteran in a New Field, Homer presents the facts and much, much more. "I looked through one of [a sharpshooter’s] rifles once,” Homer wrote to a friend years after the war. “The impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army and I always had a horror of that branch of the service." Homer’s images of war, even when at rest, never lose that sense of horror, however faint.



I’ve always found Homer’s work fascinating for its balance of commercialism and artistry. Homer always kept an eye on public tastes, filling it first with his Civil War works and later with more domestic scenes after the war. The image of the small town full of good people and children playing happily embedded in the late nineteenth century American consciousness owes much to Homer’s work. In a way, he filled the need of the country, coming to the emotional rescue of a nation longing for peace. Peace, however, failed to fill Homer’s own artistic need for drama and tension. While living on the rocky coast of Maine, Homer watched the daily drama of men and women battling the sea. The Life Line (above, from 1884) shows a man rescuing a woman from the deadly pull of the ocean. The woman’s wet clothes cling scandalously to her body. A red scarf obscures the face of the rescuer at the same time that it draws the viewer’s eye to the center of the painting. Even the straining ropes securing their lives speak of the tension of this scene. Nature itself seems to conspire against the pair in an image that encapsulates the conflict between humanity and nature.



Homer paints that conflict between humanity and nature even more nakedly in The Gulf Stream (above, from 1899). I’ve seen The Veteran and The Gulf Stream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and marveled at the impact those individual figures have against their respective backdrops. Whereas The Veteran navigates a sea of grass, the lone sailor of The Gulf Stream pilots his way through the shark-infested waters of the Bahamas, which Homer visited in the late 1890s. Both men find themselves at risk of being devoured by death—the veteran through his memories of war and the sailor through actual physical peril. Homer apparently reworked The Gulf Stream many times, adding the tiny ship in the far distance that appears in the top left corner ever so faintly. After a lifetime of witnessing death and destruction, Homer may easily have fallen prey to a moment of despair, but he ultimately allows a small glimmer of hope of rescue against all the odds.

When the Nazis threatened to destroy the works of Der Blaue Reiter group and other modern artists in their quest to eradicate what they deemed “Degenerate Art,” Gabriele Munter, a member of Der Blaue Reiter , spirited many of those works to her countryside home and hid them from certain destruction at great personal risk. Born February 19, 1877, Munter, along with Paula Modersohn-Becker and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, represents the female contingent of German Expressionism. In 1901, Munter enrolled in the Phalanx School, the art school founded by Wassily Kandinsky, who would become not only her teacher but also her lover. Along with Franz Marc, August Macke, and others, they founded Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. In her painting Boating (above, from 1910), Munter paints Kandinsky standing in the boat, guiding the way as the woman (Munter herself?!) rows the boat. If there’s a great woman behind every great artist, Munter was certainly the one behind Kandinsky at this period of his career.



Munter learned not only from Kandinsky but from all the members of Der Blaue Reiter. She adopted her bold, spiritually charged palette from Marc. From Alexej von Jawlensky, she learned the technique of cloisonnisme, in which the artist darkly outlines all the shapes. Munter used that technique in her portrait of Jawlensky with fellow artist Marianne von Werefkin (above, from 1909). Munter paints her friends with unrecognizable abstraction. If it weren’t for her title, they could be any couple lounging on the grass. With such scenes Munter took common Impressionist subject matter and updated it for the Post-Impressionist world.



When World War I erupted, Kandinsky and Munter fled to Switzerland, escaping the fate of Marc, Macke, and so many other artists killed in the war. Kandinsky later returned to his native Russia and married another woman. Munter and Kandinsky reportedly never saw one another again. Despite that betrayal, Munter always remained true to the art of Kandinsky and her friends, even in the dark days of the Nazi regime. Her Yellow House With Apple Tree (above, from 1910) offers an idyllic scene of the happy home she may have once dreamed of having with Kandinsky. The bright colors and strong outlines that made many of her works seem like stained glass windows often acted as a window into her romantic, faithful soul.

When Honore Daumier caricatured King Louis Philippe as Gargantua (above, from 1832) he won a huge audience—and one very angry enemy. Born February 20, 1808, Daumier spent six months in prison for tweaking the king with his art, pointing out how the monarch placed in power by the July Revolution in 1830 wasn’t much better than the person he replaced. Daumier spoke truth to power—loud and clear. In both prints and sculptures, he showed the weaknesses and foibles of the rich and powerful as well as the effects of that class’ actions on the poor and powerless. Prison did little to blunt the sharpness of Daumier’s pen.



By the 1840s, Daumier shifted away from illustration and depictions of the upper class to painting and portrayals of the middle and lower classes. His The Third Class Wagon (above, from 1864) caricatures the faces and figures of the French peasant class huddled together like sheep, but with affection rather than disdain. Despite the cramped quarters, the people in the background seem vitally engaged in conversation, sharing in their common condition. The figures in the foreground—the woman and child, the elderly woman, and the little boy—each tell small little stories with the simplest details. I especially love the hat of the little boy sitting on the suitcase upon which Daumier has signed the painting. The old woman in the center brings to mind Van Gogh’s later paintings of peasants, such as his The Potato Eaters. Such a modern approach placed Daumier far beyond his peers, a man born before his time.



Despite his early success and abundant talent, Daumier’s choice of subject and political stance didn’t make him a rich man. Towards the end of his life, Daumier found himself part of the impoverished class he painted with such tenderness. Fortunately, his friend Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot provided him with a home to live out his final years. “It is not for you that I do this,” Corot said to the protesting, still-proud Daumier. “It is merely to annoy your landlord.” To the end, Daumier could still get under the skin of those in positions of authority. Like the characters in his painting, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (above, from 1849-1850), Daumier never stopped tilting at windmills, fighting the good fight with his imaginative, romantic spirit against all the odds to the bitter end.

I will readily confess that Pierre Auguste Renoir was far from my favorite Impressionist until recently. Born February 25, 1841, the Renoir in my head was the Renoir of the rounded female nudes and the quaint scenes of nineteenth century French life, such as his The Artist’s Family (above, from 1896). I’ve seen The Artist’s Family at the Barnes Foundation, just one of the 180 paintings in their collection. When Dr. Barnes began to assemble his collection, anything signed Renoir was an automatic buy, regardless of the relative quality of the work. A walk through the Barnes’ galleries will leave anyone with Renoir fatigue and a distorted picture of the artist himself. Fortunately, the PMA’s 2007 exhibition Renoir Landscapes helped dispel my misconceptions and taught me how to learn to love Renoir.



I’ve often walked through the PMA’s Impressionist section and mentally compared Renoir’s The Large Bathers (above, from 1887) with Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, painted nearly twenty years later. Renoir always seemed to suffer in that comparison. Cezanne always seemed much more interesting and Renoir much too safe, even when you knew that his future wife Aline (the pudgy matron of The Artist’s Family just nine years later) posed for the bather on the right. The softness of Renoir’s brushstrokes spoke of weakness to me. I could forgive Renoir’s close friend Claude Monet for a similar approach, but Renoir’s apparently self-constrained choice of subject matter just left me cold.



It took images of warmer, exotic climates to warm me up to Renoir finally, such as his Algerian Landscape, “The Ravine of the Wild Woman” (above, from 1881), just one of the revelations of the Renoir Landscapes exhibition. (My review of that catalogue is here.) Seeing Renoir’s approach to landscape and even seascapes (especially his two mesmerizingly abstract paintings titled The Wave), I found a new respect for him. The closed world I imagined Renoir inhabiting soon exploded to include Algeria and Italy. Suddenly, thanks to Algerian Landscape and other paintings, I could see traces of Delacroix in Renoir. Looking at the final gallery of works done when arthritis plagued Renoir so much that he needed to have the brushes strapped to his hands, I recognized a soul consumed by painting. In those final years, seeking the warmth of the south of France, the aging Renoir welcomed the young Henri Matisse as a pilgrim and fellow artist. I always wondered why Matisse felt drawn to Renoir. Now I think I finally know why.

[BTW—The PMA’s presentation of Renoir Landscapes included one of my all-time favorite lecture titles: “Why We Love to Hate Renoir.” I had tickets but had to miss it, but would love to know what they said someday.]

In most lists of the great Romantic painters, one of the most unfairly left off is Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz. Born February 22, 1806, at the height of Neo-classicism and Romanticism in European art, Wiertz waffled between the two forms in works such as Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle (above, from 1836), which shows Greeks and Trojans fighting over the body of Patrocles in a scene from Homer's Iliad. Even harking back to such classical themes, which haunted Wiertz’s imagination dating back to his copying of the Old Masters in the Louvre, he cannot resist allowing the Gothicism of his soul to peek out. In the 1890s, J.M.W. Turner was once called “the Wiertz of landscape-painting,” thanks to Turner’s late, wild settings. Such a remark reveals just how well known Wiertz once was and makes us wonder why he’s so little known today.



Like so many other artists of the period, Wiertz read the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont and translated them into images. His painting The Premature Burial (above, from 1854) pays homage to Poe’s tale of the same name, depicting the sense of horror on the face of the not-yet-dead victim finding himself alone in the crypt. Wiertz’s mind often took a decidedly dark turn. He even painted a decapitated head, post-guillotine, sitting on the floor. In such works Wiertz looks forward to Symbolism and even Surrealism, going beyond even the loose boundaries of Gothic Romanticism.



And, yet, there’s always this pull in Wiertz back to the classical. In The Suicide (above, from 1854), the central figure does himself in with a shot to the head, obscuring his face in the blast as he’s blasted into oblivion. The vitality of the dying figure fits in with the standard liveliness of the Romantic body. However, Wiertz bookends this Romantic figure between a devil and an angel, classical representatives of evil and good pulling him in opposite directions as he hesitates pulling the trigger, just as Wiertz himself felt pulled in opposite directions. Wiertz didn’t just paint the Gothic side of Romanticism, he lived and died in the Gothic, as if he himself were a character from a Poe tale. Upon his death, which came while painting in his studio, Wiertz left instructions for his remains to be handled according to Ancient Egyptian burial rites. Looking back at his life and work, Wiertz remains a sphinx-like figure.

When Ross King searched for a face and a name to represent the nineteenth-century French art establishment and the Paris Salon for his book The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, he looked no further than Ernest Meissonier. Born February 21, 1815, Meissonier epitomized the Classicist school of painting and sculpture—the perfect foil for Manet and the Impressionists bursting upon the scene. Works such as Messonier’s 1814 Campagne de France (Napoleon campaigning in Northern France) (above, from 1864), one of the many works he painted of Napoleon and his armies in battle, seemed like relics of a past best forgotten next to the new wave in art and society represented by Manet and his followers in all the arts.



Meissonier may have been a difficult man to love. He was meticulous in everything, researching every last detail of sweeping works full of animals and men with their uniforms and equipment. He built small, to-scale sculptures of horseback soldiers and even reproduced the saddles in leather in his quest for realistic perfection. I remember standing in front of his 1814 Campagne de France at the Louvre and finding it hard not to be impressed by his effort and skill. When in 1848 riots erupted in Paris against king Louis Philippe, resulting in his abdication and the Second Republic, Meissonier captured the moment in all its harsh realism in works such as The Barricade, rue de la Mortellerie, June 1848 (above, from 1848). Whereas earlier artists as Delacroix placed a romantic spin on the 1830 revolution in his Liberty Leading the People, Meissonier chose instead to portray the human cost of this political upheaval.



During the Franco-Prussian war and the 1870 siege of Paris, Meissonier got even closer to the action, serving on the staff of Napoleon III. While serving as a colonel of a quickly thrown-together unit, Meissonier took the time to remember and paint such scenes as The Siege of Paris (above, from 1871). The central figure represents the indomitable spirit of the French people (ala Delacroix), but the fallen bodies all around very accurately convey the death and destruction of that war. In The Judgment of Paris, King actually does a pretty good job of presenting Meissonier as a sympathetic character betrayed by time and changing tastes. For all the aggrandizement of war and patriotism in the long history of French art, dating back to the days of Jacques-Louis David, Meissonier offers a refreshingly clear and accurate picture of his country’s struggles.

When Giovanni Bazzi criticized Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, he didn’t know how much that would forever change his life and legacy. The artist known today as Sodoma died February 15, 1549. Born in 1477, Bazzi epitomizes the Siena brand of High Renaissance painting, especially in works such as his Saint Sebastian (above, from 1525), which presents the swooning saint with his trademark assortment of arrows pointing in all directions. Unfortunately, thanks to a vengeful Vasari and the power of negative press, Bazzi’s artistic achievement remained overshadowed by the accusations of homosexuality and pedophilia for centuries. “'His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable,” Vasari wrote. “And as he always had boys and beardless youths about him of whom he was inordinately fond, this earned him the nickname of Sodoma; but instead of feeling shame, he gloried in it, writing stanzas and verses on it, singing them to the accompaniment of the lute.” Histories of the Renaissance overflow with tales of dangerous and talented characters, but, sadly, Bazzi may not have been one of them.



Bazzi’s Saint George and the Dragon (above, from 1518) displays his talent for imaginative decoration and flourishes of colorful detail. By all non-Vasari accounts, Bazzi, known as "Il Mattaccio" (i.e., the maniac), dressed the part of the wild man artist, lived with his wife and children, enjoyed telling jokes and playing music, and even managed a large menagerie of exotic animals in his home, which may have inspired some of the details of the dragon squaring off with Saint George. There’s some evidence that Bazzi may have actually used “Sodoma” in his signature in later years, but I’m not sure if that’s a sign of shameless pride (as Vasari would like us to believe) or simple resignation to the power of Vasari’s ability to create a professional identity for him, whether he liked it or not.



As late as the 1600s, works by Bazzi such as his Pieta (above, from 1540) were attributed to Leonardo da Vinci thanks to their powerful use of chiaroscuro. Certainly, Bazzi knew how to paint and borrowed many of the best aspects of the contemporaries he most admired. Raphael admired Bazzi’s work and used Bazzi’s portrait for that of the philosopher Protogenes in his The School of Athens. Raphael places Protogenes/Bazzi/Sodoma far to the right, half hidden behind the curving arch as if almost ashamed to be in the picture. Vasari’s Lives of the Painters tells many of the wonderful stories that make up the patchwork collage of early art history, but Giovanni Bazzi, aka Sodoma, remains Vasari’s greatest victim.

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe traveled to Italy in 1786, it seemed natural that he would strike up a friendship with fellow German artist Johann Tischbein, who had been living in Rome for several years learning from the masters of the Renaissance. Born February 15, 1751, Tischbein most famous painting, Goethe in the Roman Campagna (above, from 1787), shows the Romantic and Classical author surrounded by the ancient ruins that inspired many of his Romantic refashionings of Classical themes. Goethe in the Roman Campagna owes much of its fame to its subject, but Tischbein deserves some credit for creating the perfect setting. Unfortunately, Goethe was a busy man who couldn’t sit still to have his portrait painted, putting Tischbein in a bind when trying to complete the portrait. Distracted by such concerns, Tischbein didn’t notice that he had painted Goethe with two left feet. Such blunders were rare for Tischbein, who became one of the finest portraitists of his time.



Johann Heinrich Wilhelm descended from a long line of distinguished painters in the Tischbein family. He continued the family business in taking commissions from wealthy patrons to paint their families, such as his The Children of Martin Anton Heckscher (above, from 1805). Unlike Goethe, all the boys have the correct arrangement of feet. Unfortunately, their body language, especially that of the boy seated and playing with his dog, seems to have lost something in translation. The awkwardness of the children seems even worse compared with the skillful handling of the natural setting used as a backdrop. Just as Tischbein placed Goethe in a neo-classical setting in accordance with Goethe’s writings, Tischbein places the Heckscher boys in a natural setting to play up the Romantic idealism of childhood’s innocence that originated in the neo-Platonism of the Romantic movement.



Tischbein gave Lady Charlotte Campbell (above) a similar neo-classical treatment. Painted while Lady Charlotte travelled through Italy, this portrait turns the famous beauty and future poet and novelist into a classical muse or goddess surrounded by the Edenic paradise of nature. Tischbein allegedly fell in love with Lady Charlotte while painting her, stunned by the combination of beauty and brains. The awkwardness and anatomical irregularities of other portraits disappear in this lovingly attentive portrait. It’s easy to imagine him lingering over the draping of the flowing gown, musing upon the forms hidden beneath, and asking the good Lady Charlotte to linger a little while longer until all the details were complete.

Many sinners and few saints populate the halls of art history. Guido di Pietro, better known as Fra Angelico, died on this date in 1455. Born around 1395, Fra Angelico created some of the finest works of the early Italian Renaissance, setting the stage for later masterpieces. A direct line of influence can be drawn from Angelico’s pupil Benozzo Gozzoli to his pupil Ghirlandaio to his star pupil Michelangelo. Thus, Fra Angelico’s Day of Judgement (above, from 1432-1435, in San Marco, Florence) can be seen as one of the starting points for Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Angelico’s Day of Judgment epitomizes the Sacred Conversations genre in which saints and angels gathered about figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary conversing and gesturing in a heavenly type of cocktail party. It’s easy to imagine Fra Angelico, who received beatification from Pope John Paul II in 1982, joining the crowd.



Vasari heaps praise on Fra Angelico like he does for few others in his Lives of the Artists. Only truly religious men, Vasari believed, could paint such scenes as Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (above, from 1437-1446). “A talent so extraordinary and so supreme as that of Fra Giovanni could not and should not descend on any save a man of most holy life, for the reason that those who work at religious and holy subjects should be religious and holy men,” Vasari wrote. “For it is seen, when such works are executed by persons of little faith who have little esteem for religion, that they often arouse in men's minds evil appetites and licentious desires; whence there comes blame for the evil in their works, with praise for the art and ability that they show.” Of course, Filippo Lippi, as Robert Browning’s poem Fra Lippo Lippi attests, breaks that rule with gusto. Regardless of his personal qualities, I love Angelico’s Annunciation for the stylized architecture and the drapery and wings of the angel. Looking at Mary’s beautifully open face today, you know instantly how it won the good father the title of “the angelic one” almost instantly.



One of the many things I regret not seeing during my trip to Florence is Fra Angelico’s works at San Marco. With so many things to see in a short amount of time, you have to prioritize, and, sadly, he didn’t make the cut. It would have been wonderful to see such works as his painting of the Crucified Christ (above, detail, from 1437-1446) in person. “He never painted a Crucifix without the tears streaming down his cheeks,” Vasari says of Fra Angelico, and you can see that intensity in the painting above. I love the tiny details, especially the tufts of chest hair and underarm hair of the dying savior. Fra Angelico may have been “the angelic one,” but his painting humanized Christ and Christianity in a way that the later humanism of Michelangelo and the Renaissance would build upon. To make a bloodless, bodiless saint of Fra Angelico would be a disservice to the blood, sweat, and tears he shed in creating his art.