From Gainsborough to Tansey: 7 Paintings in California

Hovering on the threshold of adulthood, this 11-year-old girl also seems to hover above the landscape in which she is placed. Her filmy skirts and satin ribbons fly up in the brisk wind that sets the clouds racing in the vast sky behind her. This image seizes the imagination with its energy, brilliance, and romance. As such, it is typical of the work of its creator—a dashing, handsome, and largely self-taught prodigy who rose from humble beginnings to become the leading English portraitist of his day, president of the Royal Academy, and knight of the realm. In his mid-20s when he painted this picture, Thomas Lawrence was already painter to the king and a Royal Academician. Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, whose nickname was “Pinkie,” came from a wealthy family in colonial Jamaica. When she was sent to school in London, age nine, her godmother in Jamaica arranged a portrait of her because she missed her so much. The unusually low viewpoint makes Sarah part of the breezy sky, a child of nature echoing the Romantic ideas of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which were popular at the time. The brushwork is breathlessly adept: fluid strokes make Sarah’s clothing dance weightlessly in the wind; hard-edged ones keep them from melting into nothing. This is one of the most popular images of all time, an enduring vision of youthfulness that appeared on Cadbury chocolate tins in the 1920s. It is poignant that Pinkie, the subject of such a life-affirming painting, died the year after the portrait was completed. Pinkie is in the collection of the Huntington in San Marino. (Ann Kay)

This dazzling portrait won great acclaim when it was first exhibited in 1770, cementing Thomas Gainsborough’s reputation as one of the finest painters of his day. At the time, the artist was earning a good living in the fashionable city of Bath, but he was anxious to make his name in London. He hoped to do this by showing The Blue Boy at a prestigious new venue, the Royal Academy, which had staged its first exhibition in 1769. The picture was probably not commissioned—it was painted on a used canvas, over another portrait. The sitter was Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ironmonger and a close friend of Gainsborough’s—Buttall was one of the pallbearers at his funeral. The youth’s fancy clothing is reminiscent of that found in the costume portraits of Anthony van Dyck, one of Gainsborough’s chief influences. Like van Dyck’s pictures, Gainsborough’s works are flamboyant, supremely elegant, and display a brilliant, virtuoso technique. Gainsborough liked to paint in subdued lighting conditions, particularly candlelight, which probably accounts for his flickering, feathery brushstrokes. He also rejected the contemporary taste for a smooth, detailed finish, insisting that his work should always be viewed from a distance. He commented dryly that paintings were “not made to be smelled” to a client who ignored this advice. Gainsborough also took particular care with his landscape backgrounds, ensuring that they complemented the mood of the picture. The Blue Boy is in the collection of the Huntington in San Marino. (Iain Zaczek)

During James Ensor’s lifetime, his home town of Ostend in Belgium developed from a small fishing village to a seaside resort. Carnival time was celebrated by the locals by wearing masks, and they became one of Ensor’s recurring motifs and a metaphor for his loneliness. This is his largest painting, showing Christ caught up in a procession—half carnival, half political demonstration. The location is not Jerusalem but Brussels, the capital of Ensor’s own country. Instead of palm branches, people are waving political slogans on banners. On the right-hand edge of the picture is the cry “Long live Christ, King of Brussels.” Ensor has made Jesus his contemporary. Citizens of Brussels are led by a military band. Someone in authority wearing a white sash stands on a green podium while a red banner proclaims: “Long live the social revolution.” Following months of strikes and uprisings, two years before this painting’s completion, the king of Belgium had declared that the working classes’ lot needed improvement. Nine years before, a liberal government had banned religious education in schools, intending to weaken the power of the church. The controversy escalated into a war of religion. Pro-Catholic parties eventually regained the majority. By painting these crowds, Ensor emphasized such events. The masks and faces are hideously distorted yet the haloed Christ is not ugly; in fact, he resembles Ensor himself. A small figure, he has an important message for the Belgian people, but they do not seem to have noticed. Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. (Susie Hodge)

Arshile Gorky was influenced by the Surrealism of Joan Miró and abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, but he developed his own style in the 1940s, later known as Abstract Expressionism. His techniques included layering paint onto the canvas and then shaving off the excess with a razor blade, leaving an unusually smooth finish. He had a strong regard for drawing, believing that it was the essence of painting. Betrothal I was painted at the height of his Abstract Expressionism. The poetic personal vocabulary and sensuous use of color infuse the loosely contoured shapes, which flow into one another in a style that has been described as “lyrical abstraction.” These “loose” forms have been said to express his emotional disintegration at the time, when a series of tragedies—his studio burning down, a cancer diagnosis, a car crash, and his wife leaving him—led to him killing himself the following year. Betrothal I is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (Lucinda Hawksley)

The Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán is best known for his numerous paintings of saints; nonetheless, although this is his only signed and dated still-life painting, this simple image is now acknowledged as one of his masterpieces. The viewer is presented with a symmetrical arrangement of domestic wares: a silver plate with four lemons, a wicker basket filled with oranges, and a silver saucer on which rests a cup of water and a pink rose. Everything is aligned along a table’s edge, which is at the foreground of the picture plane and tantalizingly close to the viewer’s touch. This is an extraordinarily still and silent image; no air is felt rustling the leaves and petals of the blossom branch, no ripple is seen across the water’s surface in the cup. Standing in front of this image it is easy to imagine the smell of the orange blossom and pink rose, the taste of the sour lemons and sweet oranges, and the feel of the cold hard surface of the metal dishes alongside the rough texture of the wicker basket. The soft yellows, oranges, pinks, and greens of the natural forms cannot help but entice, as does the strange, strict order of this geometrical arrangement. The stark austerity and humility of this image has led to the interpretation that it is a painting of religious symbols and especially of the Virgin Mary. The lemons are a fruit associated with Easter, orange blossom suggests chastity, the water-filled cup is a symbol of purity, and the rose is an allusion to the Virgin. Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. (Aliki Braine)

Ross Bleckner was born in New York. As a student at New York University he was encouraged by Chuck Close to enroll at the California Institute for the Arts. Despite the predominance of conceptual and photographic work at that time, Bleckner maintained a commitment to painting. Returning to New York in 1974, he settled in SoHo and was among the first artists to join the then fledgling Mary Boone Gallery along with David Salle and Julian Schnabel. At the time Bleckner’s style had little in common with the muscular Neo-Expressionism of most of the gallery’s artists. His early paintings were formal compositions containing striped and spiraling forms—reworkings of the visual devices of Op Art. The art world’s preference was still for expressive figuration, and Bleckner was disappointed by the response to his work of this period. The excesses of the art of the 1980s, however, gradually appeared overblown and played out, which coincided with the emergence of Bleckner’s subtle and symbolic imagery. Despite appearing abstract, the paintings depict real-world things, sometimes at a microscopic level, and it is hard to tell whether we are very close or far away from the painting’s subject. In this painting we could be gazing at a starry constellation or cell mutation. Bleckner was among the earliest artists to address AIDS in his work, and the death of his father through cancer influenced work based on electron-microscopy. His comment that it is a cell wall that separates us from disaster adds melancholy to this sublimely seductive painting. Knights Not Nights is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Roger Wilson)

The large-scale, monochromatic canvases of American painter Mark Tansey, the son of two art historians, are packed with playful, ironic, in-jokes about art as well as hidden images and portraits that reflect the influence of French Surrealist René Magritte. Wake is one of a series painted in ultramarine blue, an apt choice for the shimmering sea that fills most of the canvas, although its acidic vibrancy emphasizes the painting’s artifice. The work’s title and the depiction of people eating alfresco as in an Impressionist painting implies that it shows an actual event, but Tansey sources his imagery from his own photographs and press clippings. He then rotates, crops, and skews his source material, combining it to produce a cohesive image of an imagined event that never occurred. He thus carefully structures a reality of his own making from juxtaposed images. On close inspection, Wake contains an anamorphic portrait of Irish writer James Joyce that is visible in the sea in the wake of the departing boat. This visual pun refers to Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939), which was regarded as highly innovative when it was published because of its use of stream of consciousness, literary allusions, and linguistic puns. Here, like Joyce, Tansey abandons the idea of the conventional narrative to create a witty work that blends images with a dreamlike quality while at the same time he challenges ideas about perception and the artist’s ability to innovate given the weight of artistic tradition. Wake is at the Broad in Los Angeles. (Carol King)