4 Paintings Found Only in the Thyssen (and 1 Formerly Held There)

Virtually untrained as an artist, Maurice de Vlaminck earned a living as a racing cyclist, violinist, and soldier before dedicating himself to painting. In 1901 he established a studio in Chatou, outside Paris, with fellow artist André Derain. In the same year he was inspired by an exhibition of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, which had a profound influence on his work. By the time Fields, Rueil was painted, Vlaminck and Derain were recognized as leading members of the Fauvist movement, a group of artists who outraged established taste by the non-naturalistic use of intense, unmixed colors. Vlaminck declared “instinct and talent” the only essentials for painting, scorning learning from the masters of the past. Yet this landscape stands clearly in line of descent from van Gogh and, beyond him, the Impressionists. With these predecessors Vlaminck shared a commitment to painting in the open air and to landscape as a celebration of nature. The broken touch with which paint is dabbed over most of the canvas (the flat color on the roofs is the main exception) also recalls the work of Claude Monet or Alfred Sisley. The cursive drawing style is pure van Gogh. Yet Vlaminck’s use of color is radically different. Pure colors straight from the tube and heightened tones transform a potentially tame scene of French suburban countryside into a virtuoso firework display. This landscape may now appear exquisite and charming, but we can still imagine how its energy might have struck the public of its day as crude and primitive. (Reg Grant)

Born in Berlin, George Grosz studied at the Royal Academy in Dresden and later with graphic artist Emile Orlik in Berlin. He developed a taste for the grotesque and the satirical fueled by World War I. After a nervous breakdown in 1917 he was declared unfit for service. His low opinion of his fellow human beings is evident in all his work. He used oil and canvas, the traditional materials of high art, although he despised the tradition of art-making. The subject matter of this painting is far from traditional: Metropolis is a scene from hell, with blood-red dominating the canvas. The composition is based on vertiginous verticals and depicts hideous wraithlike creatures fleeing from terror. Although he distanced himself from Expressionism, the angular distortions and dizzying perspective have grown from the work of artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The imagery in Metropolis suggests disaster on a huge scale: the city is collapsing on itself and the overall color suggests conflagration. With revolution and World War II around the corner, it is horribly prescient. The work is satirical and openly critical of bourgeois society and particularly of authority. Later, together with Otto Dix, Grosz developed Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity)—moving away from Expressionism by calling for the unemotional perception of the object, a focus on the banal, insignificant, and ugly, and painting devoid of context or compositional wholeness. In 1917 Malik Verlag began publishing Grosz’s graphic works, bringing him to the attention of a wider audience. (Wendy Osgerby)

Born in New York to German parents, Lyonel Feininger’s career was shaped by a conflict of national loyalties, ethnic tension, and political turmoil. Moving to Germany to study, Feininger became a magazine illustrator, caricaturist, and a pioneer of that distinctively American art form, the comic strip. The strips he briefly produced for the Chicago Tribune are among the most innovative ever made, but his refusal to move back to America curtailed his contract, and he resolved to abandon commercial art. Feininger began to develop his own style of analytical Cubism and, in 1919, became one of the founding members of the Bauhaus. It was while teaching there that he painted The Lady in Mauve. Feininger’s careful layering of overlapping planes of color and form to create a nocturnal, urban tableau is infused with the city’s bustling energy. The central image of a purposefully striding young woman is based on a much earlier drawing of 1906, The Beautiful Girl. Thus the painting functions as both homage to the dynamic Parisian art scene that first inspired him and as a celebration of the confidence of the early Weimar Republic, when Germany had surpassed France as the locus of the European avant-garde. It was not to last, however, and Feininger and his Jewish wife were compelled to flee Germany in 1936. Settling once more in New York, Feininger found renewed inspiration in the scenes of his childhood.In the last 20 years of his life, he became a key figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism. (Richard Bell)

Franz Kline described his paintings as “situations” and believed that good art accurately conveyed the emotions of its creator. His best known works are monumentally scaled abstract canvases that retain a visible residue of the highly physical process behind their creation. Though Kline claimed that these works reference specific places, they do not seem guided by any objective logic. Like the works of fellow action painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Kline’s paintings appear to be a spontaneous, muscular translation of the artist’s will into material form. Kline typically worked in a monochromatic palette of black and white. The addition of bold, thick streaks of color in Orange and Black Wall adds yet another dimension of vitality and dynamism to the finished work. The black lines appear to form an Expressionistic grid, out of which the orange, green, and red spill. Despite the lack of a clear division between figure and ground, the painting never becomes static. It resounds with an array of potential emotive origins and so invites constant speculation as to its meanings. Kline’s dramatic life only fueled his iconic status—he struggled for years to find success as a portrait and landscape painter, rose rapidly to international prominence in the 1950s when he began painting in pure abstractions, then died of heart failure in 1962, only 51 years old and at the height of his fame. As a public figure, he reflects the “celebrity artist” phenomenon that pervaded the mid-20th-century American art world. This painting was once part of the Thyssen collection; it was acquired by a private collector in the 1990s and later donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (Nicholas Kenji Machida and Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Francis Bacon spent his early years moving between England and Ireland. He had a troubled family life, which instilled in him a strong sense of displacement. He lived for a short time in Berlin and Paris, where he decided to become a painter, but was mainly based in London. The self-educated artist increasingly turned to painting dark, emotional, and unsettling subject matter with existential themes, and he gained recognition in the postwar years. Recurrent preoccupations in his work include war, raw meat, political and sexual power, and decapitation. Bacon also revived and subverted the use of the triptych, which, in the history of Christian iconography, emphasized the omnipresence of the Holy Trinity. Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror is an image of Bacon’s lover and muse, George Dyer, who Bacon claimed to have met when Dyer was robbing his house. The figure of Dyer, dressed in a gangster’s lounge suit, is deformed and severed, the reflection of his face fractured in the mirror. The portrait confronts the viewer with the sexual nature of the painter’s relation to the subject—it has been suggested that the splashes of white paint represent semen. An additional series of naked portraits of Dyer reveals the intimacy of their union. Here, Dyer looks askance at his own image, reflecting his narcissistic behavior and the sense of isolation and detachment Bacon felt in their often stormy relationship. Dyer committed suicide in Paris on the eve of the artist’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais. His broken face here foreshadows his early demise. (Steven Pulimood and Karen Morden)