The National Museum of Modern Art in Paris Has These 15 Notable Paintings

The highly original series of four Blue Nudes created by Henri Matisse during the period 1952–54 was born from a combination of tradition and experiment. Blue Nude III represents a definitive stage on Matisse’s journey toward abstraction, while remaining recognizably representative of the human form. The color blue signified distance and volume to Matisse. Frustrated in his attempts to successfully marry dominant and contrasting tones, the artist was moved to use solid slabs of single color early in his career, a technique that became known as Fauvism. The painted gouache cut-outs that comprise the Blue Nudes were inspired by Matisse’s collection of African sculpture and a visit that he made to Tahiti in 1930. It took another 20 years and a period of incapacity after an operation before Matisse synthesized these influences into this landmark series. The artist found the process of arranging cut-out sections of painted gouache far more manageable than working directly with paint on canvas. He named the process “drawing in paper,” and the definition of the figure is found in the spaces between the cut-outs. The effect is almost that of a relief, but in two dimensions. As a culmination of Matisse’s long search for a perfect blend of color and form, the Blue Nudes represent an ending of sorts. Yet, in their originality, they led to new beginnings for Matisse’s successors. French artists of the 1960s, such as Claude Viallat, and American abstractionists, such as Mark Rothko, built on the foundations laid by Matisse and won great acclaim in their own right. (Dan Dunlavey)

The gray structures of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s Cubism had astonished Robert Delaunay with their cobweblike appearance. His response was to flesh out their silvery skeletons with vivid, delicately applied color, as seen in this painting of the spires of a 14th-century Gothic church rising above a town. Shards of pink foliation are indicated by a flurry of brushmarks, reverberating against the greens and violets of the town’s walls. Delaunay’s rhomboids of shifting light and shade destabilize a fixed viewing position. Within a year of painting Les Tours de Laon, his color experiments shifted toward an increasingly abstract language in which architectural forms flattened into a kaleidoscope of interlocking shapes. Termed Orphism, Delaunay believed this non-representational “pure painting” could affect consciousness as deeply as the music of Orpheus had charmed the ancient gods. (Zoë Telford)

Francis Picabia set out on his artistic adventure at the outset of the 20th century—an exciting time for modern French painting. Not happy to settle with one particular style, from 1902 to 1908 Picabia drew from several influences. Experimenting first with Impressionism and then Fauvism, he constantly pushed the boundaries of his art, until he found a brief resting place in 1911 with Section d’Or—a group of painters who, fueled by the questions posed by Cubism, began to move the pictorial plane in new directions. Following a trip to New York, where he worked on what he called “abstractions” or “pure paintings,” Udnie seems to take what Cubism offers and toys with it. Dancing curves reminiscent of a female form mark a softening of Cubist forms, while Picabia’s palette—infused with vivid blues and greens, hints of copper, and metallic steel—breaks free from subdued Cubist colors. This playful interpretation of Cubism became known as Orphism. Udnie is thought to have been inspired by a ballerina. From 1913 to 1919, Picabia embraced the Dada movement, traveling again to the United States to disseminate its ideas, which influenced Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual art. (Alice Bell)

Pablo Picasso was an artistic prodigy from an early age. However, he became frustrated by traditional methods of representation, and inspired by Paul Cézanne’s flattened depiction of space, he worked with Georges Braque to reinvent artistic expression. Their Cubist approach revolutionized the art world. Picasso experimented furiously, stripping down an object to its essentials and constructing something less naturalistic. In 1912, he began creating collage works that featured the recurring use of objects, such as guitar, violin, and the human head. Picasso collated objects in ways that initially elicit feelings of confusion, but with further viewing offer myriad interpretations. Is that a smile in Head of a Young Girl? Is the girl hiding something, or is that a door waiting to be opened? However, interpretations may be foolhardy, for as Picasso himself said, “To search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” (Simon Gray)

Sonia Delaunay grew up in Gradizhsk in what is today Ukraine before moving to Paris in 1905, where she met and married Robert Delaunay in 1910. In 1912 they developed Orphism, a style of painting that was closely related to Futurism and Cubism and emerged at the same time, although it was generally more abstract and colorful. Orphism was named after Orpheus, the mythological Greek poet and musician, by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who saw links with the harmonious overlapping planes of bright, contrasting colors and harmonies in music. It was also called “Simultanism,” as it combined geometric forms, bold patterns, and intense color simultaneously. In 1914 Paris was gradually replacing its hazy gas street lamps with bright electric ones. Obsessed with the nature of light, especially the way in which light from these electric lamps distorted into prisms and halos as it fell onto the streets, Sonia Delaunay painted Prismes Électriques (“Electric Prisms”). The work emphasizes luminosity and vibrant color with rhythmic circles of light, evoking movement and depth. By layering color and pattern, she suggests action and excitement, in contrast to the static composition and subdued palette of Cubism. She produced many studies for this piece, using crayons, cut papers, watercolor, and oil paints, which were originally exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants. Also a designer of clothes, furniture, theater sets, and ballet costumes, she was arguably the inventor of the polka dot and used zigzags and other innovative designs in fabric and on canvas. (Susie Hodge)

Although Emil Nolde was a member of Die Brücke, a group that played a pivotal role in German Expressionism, he was a distinctly individual painter who remained an isolated figure for much of his life. In spite of this he traveled widely, including to the East Indies as part of an ethnographic trip that further informed him of so-called primitive art. Nolde’s Still Life with Dancers seems to be an experiment, drawing together the familiar, domestic scene with some of the exotic images he had seen on his travels. In the foreground are two vases of yellow and red tulips and a cow gravy jug reminiscent of home. Upon the warm, earthy backdrop hangs a picture of two bare-chested, skirted female figures dancing with wild abandon—natives of a faraway place. His simplified depiction of these human forms seems to have psychological rather than anthropological aims. A prolific artist and a deeply religious man, Nolde went on to paint visionary figures of the Old and New Testament, but throughout his life he continued to paint subjects such as flowers, all with the same intensity. His ability to capture the essence of an object was central to his art. (Alice Bell)

Max Beckmann is known more for his works’ violent energy than for bucolic forest scenes, so at first glance his Landscape with Woodcutters seems anomalous. The interior of the canvas, however, evinces Beckmann’s singular sense of space. Between the trees, the dwellings, boughs, and foliage are crowded into a vertical composition dominated by dark colors. The deconstructed forms heaped on top of one another create a feeling of closure and disorientation. The figures stand in the open foreground, and, by situating the subject outside the confusion of the forest, Beckmann suggests relative, if temporary, security. But the woodcutters are tiny in comparison with the vastness of the trees, suggesting the turmoil of the background is impossible to resist. The oddly situated ladder appears as a symbolic element; the heightened color contrasts imbue a dreamlike light. (Alix Rule)

Tamara de Lempicka was born Maria Gorska to affluent parents in fin-de-siècle Poland. After her parents divorced, her wealthy grandmother adopted her and sent her to a prestigious boarding school in Switzerland. When she was 16, and already startlingly beautiful and spoiled, she fell in love with a young lawyer, reputed to be the most handsome bachelor in Warsaw. He had no money of his own, but her uncle provided a dowry, and they were married in St. Petersburg, in a high-fashion wedding. A year later her husband was arrested by the Bolsheviks. She was said to have charmed the officials into freeing him, and the couple fled to Paris, where she changed her name. Paris was where she developed her distinctive Art Deco style of painting. Her paintings are a pure expression of sex and power; Young Girl in Green is no exception. Her male and female figures, whether nude or clad in sensual fabric, are usually set against imposing urban settings, and her paintings and her aesthetic have inspired countless fashion shoots, films, art, and artists. Between the wars, she painted portraits of writers, entertainers, artists, scientists, industrialists, and Eastern Europe’s exiled nobility—many of whom were also her lovers. When World War II began, she and her husband moved to Hollywood, where she became a “painter to the stars.” She subsequently lived in Manhattan and Houston, Texas, before moving to Mexico. After she died there, she was cremated, so her ashes could be spread on the top of the volcano Popocatépetl according to her wishes. (Ana Finel Honigman)

It may not be not surprising that Paul Klee, a violinist who was married to a pianist, became fascinated by the relationship between music and art. After settling in Munich, Klee met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, who believed that the purpose of art is to unite the inner world of feeling and outer world of color and form—and that music is the key to achieving this. This deceptively simple painting consists of three colors—the equivalent of three beats to the bar—against a rich brown background. Klee stacked up his brushstrokes resulting in a heavy impasto. The “beats” are not evenly spaced; the numbers in each row vary between six and eight. It is tempting to read the painting like a musical score from left to right and top to bottom, but this is not the only way to read this image—the squares of color have relationships vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally. (Wendy Osgerby)

Throughout his life, Salvador Dalí demonstrated a rapacious ability to assimilate an array of different styles and forms, ranging from a refined academic classicism to the most cutting-edge avant-garde. Initial exhibitions of Dalí’s drawings in Barcelona attracted significant attention, with a response of both vehement praise and scorn. This divided reaction continues to this day. According to Dalí, Partial Hallucination: Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano is a “hypnogogic picture” whose genesis he describes as follows: “At sunset, I saw the bluish, shiny keyboard of my piano, where the perspective exposed to my view a series in miniature of little yellow, phosphorescent halos surrounding Lenin’s visage.” Dalí did not identify himself with the revolutionary tendencies of the Paris Surrealist group. Instead he claimed his ambiguous stance as that of an “anarcho-monarchist,” refusing to fight in the Spanish Civil War or align himself with any political party. He provoked much controversy when residing in Spain as a supporter of the military dictator Francisco Franco, as most artists had fled the country in renunciation of his fascist leadership. This led to Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group in 1937 by its leader André Breton, who renamed the artist with the anagram Avida Dollars, foreseeing the great wealth and fame he would achieve later in life, after moving to the United States in 1940. (Jessica Gromley)

After a brief stint at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, the Romanian artist Victor Brauner initially painted landscapes reflective of Paul Cézanne’s influence, but his work became increasingly Expressionist and abstract. He founded the Dadaist magazine 15HP with the avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca in 1924, and between 1929 and 1931 he contributed articles to Unu, a Dadaist and Surrealist paper. By 1930 he had moved to Paris, where he became friendly with Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to other members of the Surrealist movement. The Palladist was painted after Brauner had recovered from a serious illness in 1943, and it is a disturbing and unsettling image typical of his work. Created with the smooth glacial tones of classical sculpture, the two abstracted and distorted figures in the foreground represent Adam and Eve, while behind them writhe the snakes of Lucifer. Adam and Eve are posed statuelike within a simple frame, suggestive of a theater stage. The large eyes that dominate the heads of the two figures were a recurring feature in the artist’s work. During the 1930s he painted a series of human figures with a distorted eye, and in 1938 the artist himself lost an eye during a fight, which lent his work a strangely prophetic air. In his notebooks Brauner wrote that every image he produced was fundamentally linked to his personal fears and worries, a fact that gives his art a poignant immediacy and helps to unravel the source of his extraordinary works. (Tamsin Pickeral)

In 1905 Raoul Dufy saw the painting Luxe, Calme et Volupté by Henri Matisse at the Salon des Indépendants, and it had a profound effect on the young artist. The brilliantly colored, intense, and emotive work encouraged Dufy toward the style of the Fauves, whose work directly affected him until around 1909, at which time he came under the spell of Paul Cézanne. At this point his approach became softer and more subtle, though he never lost his love of pure color and the technique of short, quick brushstrokes. From around 1920 the artist developed his own unique approach to painting, characterized by bright color, broad washes, and a patterned surface. Dufy’s work is universally positive and upbeat, making him one of the most refreshingly untormented artists of the 20th century. His studio was a subject that Dufy depicted several times, a habit popular with his contemporaries. In this painting he shows a view through a window (again characteristic of his interior scenes) and another view through an open door. The view through his window appears to impinge on his studio as the red-roofed house is seen in front of the window frame. This shows the artist manipulating the rules of composition and perspective in a manner that recalls his Cubist forays, creating a diverting take on illusion. The bright colors and decorative nature of his linear drawing again contribute to the encompassing aesthetic appeal of his work. (Tamsin Pickeral)

Nicolas de Staël began painting still lifes and portraits, but between 1942 and 1952 he adopted a primarily non-figurative style. Composition, a canvas from the latter half of de Staël’s abstract period, consists of a series of flat areas of discrete color, applied using a palette knife. The complementary range of gray-browns, browns, and yellow ochres forms a credible, unified whole through the juxtaposition of these colors and the repertoire of angular shapes within which they are contained. The generic title is one the artist employed at this stage of his career to imply the composed nature of the canvases. Although Composition bears the hallmarks of certain precedents within the context of modern painting, including Cubism, de Staël managed to actualize a language for painting that, in effect, was nevertheless singular in its contribution to postwar European abstraction. (Craig Staff)

While the majority of artists in Cuba tended to use their work to explore their national identity, Wifredo Lam traveled to Europe, becoming a member of the artistic vanguard there. Lam certainly made use of aspects of Cuban culture and family origins within his work, but his work was not defined by them. The Surrealist qualities of Lam’s art display themselves in his use of primitive iconography in works such as Umbral. The three dominant objects suspended within this dark canvas appear like horned masks displayed on a wall. Simply constructed of a series of flat shapes and lines, these objects are almost unrecognizable as figures, either human or animal. In a magical way their pose and outstretched limbs give them life. The central positioning of the figures creates space and volume within the canvas, giving the overall composition order and stability. Although each shape at first appears static, the repetition of the main figure creates a distinct sense of motion and energy. The yellow rhombuses between the figures reinforce this, as the single dot on the left-hand side becomes two on the right. This implies some kind of evolution or transition—a movement over a threshold. The fourth figure lies prostrate at the foot of the dominant three, almost punctured by their daggerlike bases. This points, perhaps, to the significance of multiple thresholds separating the living world from death and the world of the unconscious mind from reality. (Hannah Hudson)

Serge Poliakoff fled Moscow during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and eventually settled in Paris in 1923. He was fascinated with the technical aspects of painting, especially the unique methods of color-layering showcased on the surfaces of the Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum in London. Poliakoff experimented with the thickness of the painted surface and engaged viscerally with the material properties of color. He prepared his own paints, almost as a homage to the Old Masters. Seemingly inspired by the Egyptian sarcophagi, in Gray and Red Composition he superimposes layers of contrasting blocks of color in order to obtain a heightened sense of inner luminescence and intensity. He worked to break new ground in the formal systems of color composition, and his work today holds an important place in postwar abstract painting. (Abraham Thomas)