The Philadelphia Museum of Art Is Home to These 12 Notable Paintings 

This painting is expressive of Enzo Cucchi’s more subdued works—somber colors and stark themes, redolent of death and sadness. In it, the crosses ostensibly mark the moorings of other boats in the port, which the ship must navigate its way beyond. Yet they are sinister, suggestive of cemeteries, or perhaps slave ships. The deliberately smeared black leeching from some of the crosses evokes not only water in the port but also tears and misery. The ship is heading directly into the most treacherous area of the port, into a crevice through which it cannot possibly pass. Cucchi’s fondness for mixing media means that his works often include reclaimed objects, such as neon lighting tubes or pieces of wood. He experiments with the use of natural and artificial lights, exploring the painterly properties of both. After the mid-1990s, Cucchi’s works began to get smaller in size, but as a result they are often much richer in detail. Cucchi subsequently became renowned for his sculpture, which faced high demand in Europe and the United States. Just as many of his paintings feature elongated figures, Cucchi’s sculptures, like Fontana d’Italia (1993), often feature elongated columns or shapes. When asked about his work in 2001, Cucchi said: “I strive to give to others a sense of sacredness, because an art event is not just a formal fact, but also a moment where you put a mark on your dedication. You must have a feeling of joining a tribe where there is the chain of command, because you are in a sacred place with its rules.” (Lucinda Hawksley)

The title of this painting, Nigredo, is an alchemical term meaning “decomposition” and is a stage in the process by which the alchemist attempts to turn “base material” into gold. To achieve a state of perfection, it was believed that the mixture of ingredients had to be heated and reduced down to black matter. Here the German artist Anselm Kiefer explores the physical, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual character of such a transformation. The base materials are either represented or physically present in this painting, which incorporates oil, acrylic, and emulsion paints, shellac, straw, a photograph, and a woodcut print. Many thinkers, including Carl Jung, saw nigredo as representing part of a spiritual or psychological process in which chaos and despair are necessary precursors to enlightenment. Kiefer uses this idea to refer to contemporary German society and culture, most notably the legacy of the Third Reich—the “place” represented here is historical rather than geographical. This is an image of a scorched and rutted earth rather than a beautiful landscape, but it suggests stubble burning in a field, anticipating new crops, and therefore new life, in the future. Kiefer’s landscapes are expressive but not Expressionist; they are used as a stage upon which the artist presents his numerous themes. The combination of paint with other materials highlights the physicality of making and reflecting; Kiefer is thus suggesting that a reflection on the purpose of painting itself is an integral part of the enlightenment process. (Roger Wilson)

English artist George Romney was born in Kendal in the Lake District. Almost self-taught as an artist, he moved to London in the 1760s and established himself as one of the most fashionable portrait painters of his day, alongside Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Romney was often asked to paint the children of his clients, for this was the period when the modern idea of family life was gaining ascendancy. In this painting he has posed the child of a wealthy London family as an unlikely shepherd girl, a popular fantasy of the period, as Marie Antoinette famously illustrated at Versailles. The unruliness of the girl’s flock suggests she may be playing the role of the notoriously lax Little Bo-Peep, from the nursery rhyme. The charm of the fantasy image is irresistible, especially as it is carried off with such technical skill. The surfaces of skin and clothing, the delightful hat, and the wool of the sheep comprise a series of harmonious variations on white. Romney’s celebration of country life here is pure artifice; it pretends to be nothing else. But the background is romantic and moody, reflecting a darker side to his work. The painting is saved from sentimentality by Romney’s talent for capturing expressive details of posture and expression. The girl’s face is alert and her gaze, shaded by the brim of the hat, is far from saccharine. There is a bold firmness to the upright figure and the unsmiling mouth. Romney’s consummate skill and perceptive eye deliver an image that is unashamedly frivolous but enduringly impressive. (Reg Grant)

J.M.W. Turner is known as the great English Romantic painter and as one of the major fathers of modernist painting. His depiction of London’s Houses of Parliament in flames, inspired by real events, brings the viewer to the border between abstraction and reality. Turner had witnessed the fire firsthand from a boat on the River Thames. He had made some rough sketches, but some months elapsed before he made a large-scale painting of the subject. The right side of the painting is dominated by the bridge, which leads across the Thames to the smoldering ruins on the other side. The twin towers of Westminster Abbey are visible in the background with the Thames and its reflections in the foreground. From a distance, however, it is difficult to recognize a realistic three-dimensional scene. The painting seems a powerful but undefined mélange of colors ranging from the bright gold and oranges at the left to the deep greens and purples to the right. The boats on the river fade into vague brown streaks. The final result is an embodiment of the Romantic sublime: the terror of fire and the radiant beauty of its light combine, putting the viewer into contact with the infinite forces of nature. When Turner exhibited the painting at the British Institution in 1835, he knew that it would cause a stir. The painting flaunts the Western tradition of realistic visual depiction in order to reach for a deeper emotional response, and it foretells the birth of abstract art. (Daniel Robert Koch)

At the heart of Paul Cézanne’s ambitions for painting was the desire to ascertain nature in its most rudimentary and elementary form. Often this meant depicting a landscape, still life, or figure study in an abbreviated manner. Mont Sainte-Victoire can be read in this way, as a series of decisions committed to the canvas only when the artist was sure that there was some fidelity between the form seen and its corresponding inscription. Cézanne had known and climbed this mountain in the south of France near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence since he was a child. In adulthood up until his death he retraced his steps, continuing to follow the trails that wended their way across the mountain. He first painted the mountain in 1882, although the mountain in these studies was one of several elements within the overall landscape. From 1886 onward the mountain came to dominate his paintings of this region. With this painting, Cézanne’s brushstrokes, while remaining discrete, cohere as a whole. Although the mountain occupies only the upper-third band of the composition, it remains set apart from the houses and largely undifferentiated treatment of foliage in the foreground by the artist’s use of the same range of blues to depict both mountain and sky. Mont Sainte-Victoire’s reduction of nature into essential units not only denotes the degree of visual scrutiny and exactitude Cézanne brought to the subject, but it also anticipates the experiments with form, perception, and space carried out under Cubism. (Craig Staff)

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was the painting that launched Marcel Duchamp into the realms of notoriety, although it took months to find its way into the public gaze. Intended for the Paris Salon des Independants show of 1912, it appears to have been too “independent” for the committee to approve and was vetoed. Duchamp looked elsewhere and the painting traveled abroad, where it was seen at an exhibition in Barcelona before being moved on to New York’s Armory Show in 1913. At the time, many critics were shocked by their first glimpse of a Cubist-Futurist painting. Cartoonists ridiculed the piece in which motion is depicted by successive superimposed images. The stark color and harsh angles are suggestive of an aggression that many viewers found unsettling. But despite its Futurist overtones, Duchamp later said that while painting it he was totally unaware of the Futurist style. (Lucinda Hawksley)

Salvador Dalí held his first one-man show in Paris in 1929, having just joined the Surrealists, who were led by former Dadaist André Breton. That year, Dalí also met Gala Eluard, the then wife of Paul Eluard, who later became Dalí’s lover, muse, business manager, and chief inspiration, encouraging him in the life of excessive wealth and artistic eccentricities for which he is now renowned. As an artist, Dalí was not limited to a particular style or medium. The body of his work, from early Impressionist paintings through his transitional Surrealist works and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) depicts a dismembered figure that acts as a visual metaphor for the physical and emotional constraints of the civil war that was taking place in Spain at the time of the painting’s execution. The figure grimaces as its own tight fist squeezes its breast with violent aggression, unable to escape its own strangulation as its foot is held down in an equally forceful grasp. Painted in 1936, the year in which war broke out, the work foresees the self-destruction of the Spanish people, while the boiled beans symbolize the decaying corpses of mass destruction. Dalí himself refused to be affiliated to a political party during the war, causing much controversy. Having been a prominent contributor to various international Surrealist exhibitions, he then moved into a new type of painting characterized by a preoccupation with science and religion. (Jessica Gromley)

Dorothea Tanning was inspired to become a painter by the Fantastic Art: Dada and Surrealism exhibition held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936. At the age of 30, she painted this self-portrait. According to her memoirs, she often bought secondhand clothes, and this ruffled purple jacket was from a Shakespearean costume. Coupled with the brown skirt of twigs, it gives her the appearance of a strange bird. There is a strong latent eroticism in the painting, which is less to do with her bare breasts than with the writhing twigs, which on closer inspection contain figures, and the uncertain invitation of the open doors. At her feet is an extraordinary composite creature, which adds an air of menace. The irrational is constantly present in Tanning’s work, and this scene is disturbing because—like any dreamscape—it is at once strange and familiar. (Wendy Osgerby)

Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta Echaurren, better known simply as Matta, once said: “Painting has one foot in architecture and one foot in the dream.” No words could sum up this painting, and Matta’s approach, any better. The picture was painted just six years after he abandoned architecture for painting, at a time when he had settled in New York and was causing a splash in the city’s progressive art world. The title refers to a major work by the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also called Large Glass, 1915–23). Like Duchamp’s work, which challenged accepted notions of what art was, Matta’s painting creates its own reality. With an architect’s understanding of spatial construction, Matta builds up a different kind of perpetually shifting, slightly receding space. Planes of transparent color intersect with strange, mechanistic objects that echo those in Duchamp’s masterwork. Painted delicately but with a draftsman’s precision, these objects seem to be moving. The painting’s powerful, dreamlike quality accords with Matta’s visionary quest to reveal the “economic, cultural, and emotional forces” and constant transformations that he felt shaped the modern world. As The Bachelors Twenty Years After was being painted, artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell were gathering at Matta’s studio. In discussions about new ways forward, Matta had a real influence on these leading Abstract Expressionists and, by extension, on later developments of 20th-century art. (Ann Kay)

No. 79 was among the later works in the Ocean Park series that established Richard Diebenkorn as an artist of international stature. Based for most of his career in the San Francisco Bay area of California, Diebenkorn evokes a sense of sun, sky, and sea in his Ocean Park paintings. Painted five years after Ocean Park No. 27, No. 79 illustrates the artist taking a more deliberate approach to his canvas than in earlier examples of the series. In marked contrast to the thin washes used in earlier work, the colors here are bold and opaque. A drip of paint is allowed to remain in the bottom right-hand area of the canvas, evidence of Diebenkorn’s over-painting and corrections. In this work we see the artist engaged with, and laboring over, the canvas in a heightened self-consciousness of the painting process. Not lost, however, is the allusion to physical space and place, which Diebenkorn’s abstract work evokes. The thin horizontals of warm color at the top of the frame recall landscape; their proportions make the large indigo areas below appear vast, which in turnrecall an expanse of sea or sky. The thin wash of paint at the left of the canvas and to the center foster a sense of depth, creating a relief from the weightiness of the paint’s application on the rest of the canvas. Meanwhile, the strong diagonals in the upper left-hand corner create a dynamism on the canvas, animating Ocean Park No. 79 despite its austere composition. In this painting, Diebenkorn’s second round of explorations with abstraction truly come into maturity. (Alix Rule)

Alex Katz’s most tenderly felt portraits are those of his wife, Ada. Few artists in history have paid such prolonged, prolific attention to one subject. Katz’s spare visual vocabulary has become associated with portraits of Manhattan’s affluent, intellectual cocktail party and country-house crowd, but his body of work concerning Ada adds profound depth, intimacy, and personality to his oeuvre of flat, cool, representational paintings. Like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Katz is sensitive to clothing and style. Through his images of his effortlessly well-dressed wife, one can chart changing fashions and observe defining differences in mood and style through the decades. In West Interior, Ada rests her head on her fist and looks at Katz with an expression of calm contentment. She wears a casual sweater, but the red, patterned shirt underneath reflects the style of the era. Her relaxed posture and loving look give this painting its pervasive sense of pleasure, warmth, and tenderness. Thanks to Katz, Ada’s elegant and intelligent face, classically chic style, and wave of black hair have become iconic images. But despite this focus, Katz offers little discernable insight into his wife’s personality. Instead, his signature hyper-reduced style articulates their mutual affection and intimacy while still retaining a distanced sense of privacy. In his images of Ada, she comes to represent universal yet singular aspects of every woman in love who is being viewed by the person who loves her. (Ana Finel Honigman)

The Jain Western Indian style developed originally at major trade centers such as Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Malwa after the 10th century. It is now considered to be a genre that had a great impact on subsequent Indian painting. Jain arts were mostly patronized by Jain merchants. The artists followed rigid conventions and did not attempt to create realistic effects. The palette was composed of rich natural pigments such as red, yellow, gold, ultramarine blue, and green. The flatness of the colors and the black angular outlines render the figures in static poses. According to Jain sacred texts, Kshatriyani Trishala gave birth to Mahavira, the 24th Jina. This event is recounted in the famous narrative Kalpasutra, which relates the life of Mahavira. This page of a manuscript of the Kalpasutra exemplifies the major characteristics of the Western Indian School, including flat colors, angular outlines, static poses, and exaggerated proportions of the body and face. The stylistic paradigms are broad shoulders, narrow waists, and a three-quarter profile of the face. The protruding eyes of the figure is a distinctive feature of the Jain style. The Western Indian style became a model for subsequent Indian paintings such as those of the Chaurapanchasika tradition. (Sandrine Josefsada)