Rosie Lesso

Girl with a Sheep in the Mountain Meadow (Mädchen mit Schaf auf Bergwiese), 1907, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Austrian artist and writer Oskar Kokoschka made a remarkable contribution to early 20^th century culture, spearheading a series of daring and inventive new visual languages. In his early career, he was a pioneering decorative artist, illustrating fantastical stories with a flat, Oriental style, while his mature art was swirling with wild, expressionistic energy. Throughout these phases of his career, Kokoschka brought CORONET BLUE’s dreamy shade of lilac blue into his otherworldly scenes, colouring anything from clothes to rippling water and wide-open stretches of yawning sky. Ultimately for him it was the colour of escape, an embodiment of the places he could disappear into while getting lost in the process of making art.

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Kokoschka was born in 1886 in the town of Pöchlarn, Austria. When he was just three years old his family relocated to Vienna, where he remained for the rest of his childhood. He showed artistic promise from an early age and at the age of 18, he earned a scholarship to study at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. While still a student Kokoschka began taking on various illustration commissions and in these early works Kokoschka found room to stretch his imagination, creating dreamy, mystical places filled with undercurrents of poetry and symbolism. The lithographic print Girl with a Sheep in the Mountain Meadow (Mädchen mit Schaf auf Bergwiese), 1907 demonstrates how the artist could convey quiet places of wonder with limited colours and striking contours. Heather blue runs across the image’s background, rippling in waves like gently undulating water.

The Distant Island (Die ferne Insel), (in-text plate, folio 6) from Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys), 1917, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

The later photolithographic print The Distant Island, 1917, was made as part of Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys), a book written and illustrated by Kokoschka as a commission from Fritz Waerndorfer, a prominent arts patron in Vienna. Kokoschka was supposed to write and illustrate a children’s fairy-tale, but instead, he created a haunting tale of awakening sexuality on a remote island, demonstrating his increasing desire to lean into subversive styles of avant-garde experimentation. Even if his client was less than pleased, the book is now revered in the history of art, making it a risk worth taking. In this image, a young girl is sprawled across a pale green lawn, carelessly looking out to sea while the hazy blue of her dress mimes the beckoning blue water beyond.

Polperro II, 1939, courtesy of Tate

In the years that followed Kokoschka was increasingly drawn into Austrian artistic circles, and he moved towards painting portraits and landscapes with a free, expressive style. Although his subjects were based on the real world, Kokoschka felt a strong desire to express the turbulent emotions he felt inside in response to his subjects, and his way of doing this was with free brushstrokes and intense colour. In the wide-open scene Istanbul I, 1930, Kokoschka looks down on the city’s harbour from above, allowing him to take in the breath-taking scene as it unfurls outwards before him. Vivid blue sky is awash with his trademark heather blue, a colour reflected like a mirror in the sparklingly bright water below.

The Crab, 1939-40, courtesy of Tate

By the time he painted Polperro II, 1939, Kokoschka had emigrated to the UK from Austria to escape the dangers of rising fascism. He settled in a house in Cornwall which looked out to sea, and this painting was made while looking out of the window to the view beyond. Angry scrawls of paint suggest the rugged turbulence of the English coastline, while the entire scene is shot through with streaks of lilac blue that lift it beyond the real world into an imaginary realm, demonstrating, perhaps, the artist’s desire to break free from the tyranny of war. The Crab, 1939-40 was also made in Kokoschka’s Cornish home, and again the image combines references to real place with the political turmoil and unease of the time in which he was living. Flashes and streaks of heather blue are rays of hope, offering the dream of freedom and escape that the artist so desperately longed for.

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Black to White Discs, 1962, courtesy of Christchurch Gallery

Shimmering silvers like MIRAGE GRAY are a hallmark feature of British artist Bridget Riley’s art, allowing her to create mesmerising depth, movement and space. Riley is widely recognised today as the iconic leader of 1960s Op Art, and she pushed the visual effects of pattern to the extreme, exploring how dots, wavy lines and patterns could induce hallucinogenic effects like warping, dizziness and afterimages. Such is the impact of her art, some have even reported fainting after staring too hard. Working with shades of black, white and grey throughout the 1960s gave Riley room to focus exclusively on shape, line and design, and the ways they could become activated, as if living and breathing. She observed, “In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.”

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Riley was born in London in 1931 to a family of artists who encouraged her choice to pursue a creative career. She trained as an artist in her home city of London, first at Goldsmith’s College, followed by the Royal College of Art. Riley worked as an art teacher in her early career while pursuing her art when she could. The 1960s were a breakthrough period when she zeroed in on black and white optical patterns and the surprising and unexpected effects they could invoke.

Hesitate, 1964, courtesy of Tate

Black to White Discs, 1962 is an early example of how simple, yet effective Riley’s Op Art could be. A diamond of grey and black dots is activated by the varying of grey and black tones, which create a push-pull effect and the sensation of constantly flowing motion, as if the dots are moving in and out of the space around them. In the same year this work was made, Riley experienced a stroke of luck; while sheltering from a rainstorm in Victor Musgrave’s gallery, she began chatting to the owner, who offered her a solo show. Its success propelled Riley’s art into the spotlight, and in the years to follow her work was shown in several important survey exhibitions celebrating rising trends for Pop, Op and Kinetic art.

In Hesitate, 1964, Riley has become more adventurous with her dotty patterns, squashing them into a crease in the image’s top half. Again, Riley playfully arranges patches of pale grey dots with darker ones, seeing how they can mess with our perception of flat, pictorial space. A streak of silvery dots runs in a diagonal from left to right like a shaft of white light, bending into the folded crease before curling upwards on its way out.

Untitled (Diagonal Curve), 1966, courtesy of Sotheby’s

The painting Arrest 3, 1965 moves into new territory with the wavy, fluid lines that would become Riley’s trademark motif. Here ribbons of silver, black and grey seem to twist and turn through space, moving with the constantly flowing flux of the sea. Light is scattered across the scene through the careful application of light gray tones, sometimes so whisperingly pale they almost disappear. By the time she made the painting Untitled (Diagonal Curve), 1966, Riley was in her element, pushing optical effects into daring, provocative and even uncomfortable territory. The pale and dark grey lines that wiggle back and forth in this work are so densely packed they create disorientating swelling and warping sensations; stare for long enough and they seem to hum and vibrate with the electric energy of digital interference.

In the screenprint Untitled [Nineteen Greys B], 1968, Riley creates a backdrop out of silvery grey, miming the polished sheen of hard metal glinting in the light. Dots arranged into a grid on its surface transform this flat grey into smoky, atmospheric space as they twist this way and that, sometimes fading into a hazy and indistinct blur. Sensations of motion, time and memory are collapsed here into one, revealing just how brooding and enigmatic pale grey can be.

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Simple Figure in Orange, 1959, Christie’s

British painter Roger Hilton was one of the most pioneering abstract painters of his generation, emerging out of the mid-20^th century with a bold and uncompromising style. He had an innate ability to merge tactile expressionism with ordered simplicity, producing images that confidently dominate the space around them. Striking passages of colour are a vital ingredient in Hilton’s paintings, particularly the warm ginger tone of CAMEL Linen, which appears again and again throughout his career. This colour’s ambiguous shade could allow Hilton to invoke various real-world references, from the warmth of human skin to the glow of golden earth caught glinting in the sun.

Hilton was born in 1911 in Northwood, Middlesex in England. His father was a doctor and his mother a painter, and it was she who had the most profound influence on Hilton’s childhood ambitions. In 1929 Hilton trained as a painter at London’s Slade School of Art, where his mother was once a student. As a young graduate Hilton went on to live in Paris for several years, studying with Roger Bissiere at the Academie Ransom. For the next decade, Hilton taught art at several different schools across England throughout his thirties, and it wasn’t until he was into his forties that Hilton began making the spirited and expressive abstract paintings that would eventually define his career.

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A friendship with the Dutch painter Constant would prove pivotal in Hilton’s career – it was Constant who introduced Hilton to the abstract art of De Stijl led by Piet Mondrian. After this time Hilton began working in a simpler and more geometric style, and reducing his palette to a limited range of primary colours. In the 1950s Hilton first visited St Ives, later settling in the nearby area of St Just. Being here allowed Hilton to become an active member of the St Ives artist community alongside Barbara Hepworth and Peter Lanyon, among others, and like them his paintings merge references to the Cornish landscape with the pioneering languages of modernist abstraction.

From the 1950s onwards Hilton’s mature painting style developed, one of bold, simple colours and expressive passages of paint. In Simple Figure in Orange, 1959, a series of closely toned caramel, biscuit and honey shades are layered over one another in thin, scumbled veils to create the illusion of depth and space. These spicy, flavoursome colours create an ambient atmosphere of comforting warmth, and suggest the lingering presence of a human body.

Untitled, 1965, Christie’s

In the later Untitled, 1965, Hilton experiments with a slightly wider pool of colours, creating an expressive riff on Mondrian’s red, yellow, blue and black palette by swapping out yellow for his trademark ginger tone. Different opacities of paint jostle side by side, suggesting solid and immaterial forms in space, from the opaque solidity of black and red to the watery translucency of caramel brown and ultramarine blue.

Untitled, 1971, Tate

As his career progressed through the years, Hilton’s paintings became increasingly playful, wild and spontaneous, echoing the languages of American Abstract Expressionism. Untitled, 1971 is one such example, with its wide pool of vibrant colours that seem to swim around one another as if caught in a snapshot moment of movement. Hilton plays with how layered colours can invoke depth, layering vivid shades of blue over one another in the background, while a solid river of toffee toned colour runs over the top. He has said, “I like my colours dynamic and strongly contrasted. After all, one prefers something alive to something dead. The more alive a person or a picture, the better they are…”

Untitled, 1974, Tate

Hilton made Untitled, 1974 just a year before he died, and despite his growing health issues, the same fresh vitality continues to run through his art. Here a limited palette of black and biscuit brown are mingled into one another, flowing organically across the page in sweeping calligraphic marks. Curved forms in camel tones seem to suggest a human body, but it could just as easily be the sinuous growth of plants, roots or rocks. As ever, the image is an invocation of energy and emotion, leaving us to fill in the gaps. Hilton once explained, “Painting is feeling. Just as much as a sentence describes, so a sequence of colours describes … I feel the shape and colours inside myself. I have the feel of a work rather than a vision of it.”

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Gouache 65 X 50 cm, 1952, Sotheby’s

Drama is at the heart of Pierre Soulages’ art, and he achieves it through stark, theatrical means. A leader in 20^th century European Abstract Expressionism, Soulages pioneered a bold, striking language, combining dark, enigmatic shades of indigo like MEDIEVAL BLUE with jet black, ultramarine and cerulean. He swept them in grand gestures across his artworks with a seemingly effortless confidence, building thick, juicy brushstrokes up in layer upon layer like sculptural constructs or stage sets. Around them, tiny slivers of white ground become breathing pockets of air and space, just enough to allow us to get lost in his imaginary realms.

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Born in Rodez, France in 1919, Soulages was a creative child who knew he wanted to become an artist. When he was 14 years old Soulages went on a school visit to the Roman Abbey of Sainte-Foy de Conques, and he was so deeply inspired by the building’s grandiose architecture and artworks that he made it his life mission to pursue an art practice. From these early teen years onwards Soulages began making stark, black and white sketches of the landscapes surrounding his home, and it was then that he knew he had found his calling.

In 1946, following the end of the war, Soulages moved to Paris in the hopes of becoming an abstract painter. Soulages’ paintings from this period featured gestural dark blue or black shapes arranged into loose geometric designs, laying the foundations for his expressionist practice to come. Ridiculed by the traditional Parisian Salon, Soulages found kinship instead with the radical avant-garde set, including the artist Frances Picabia, who took Soulages under his wing and became both a friend and mentor.

Peinture 130 X 162, cm, 1957. Sotheby’s

Throughout the 1950s Soulages began promoting and exhibiting his art beyond France, and he found a more receptive audience to his art in international circles, particularly Germany, Japan and the United States, places where Abstract Expressionism had already taken hold. Buoyed on by this recognition, Soulages made ever more stark and dramatic artworks, refining down his brushstrokes to the most minimal sweeps and strokes. Restricting his art to a limited palette of blue, black and purple allowed Soulages to focus on the immediacy of his marks, and their heightened dramatic effect.

In Gouache 65 X 50 cm, 1952, a solid square of dark indigo looms spectre-like in the centre of the scene, while black, calligraphic gestures overlay it like the foundations of a building in the making. Around it Soulages leaves traces of white peeking through, while grey washes become a misty haze of atmosphere somewhere in the far distance. In the later Peinture 130 X 162 cm, 1957, dark marks are scattered across the canvas as if floating in the white space around them, demonstrating Soulages’ growing confidence in purity and simplicity. His design is deceptively simple here – what might appear to be a fluid, effortless arrangement of painted strokes is in fact a considered arrangement of colour, light and form, as shapes are carefully laid on top of one another, each one containing its own patina of shimmering dark blue, indigo and black.

Peinture 202 x 159 cm, 1967

Peinture 202 x 159 cm, 1967 is even more simplified, a field of intense blue darkness where only tiny slivers of light show through. Close inspection reveals how Soulages has built up his design here gradually, layering semi-transparent sheaths of paint on top of one another, swishing his bold strokes this way and that until it appears just right. The result is both a deeply tactile object and an illusionistic window into an abstract world, one that is almost entirely obscured by dramatic colour. In Eau Forte, 1974, Soulages brings two columns of blue side by side, each one with its own delicately shifting palette and appealingly careworn surface resembling rusted metal or peeling paintwork. In this elegant, minimal work Soulages demonstrates his masterful understanding of colour, and he reveals an innate understanding of the hidden mysteries lurking inside the darkest shades of indigo.

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Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude) / Henri Matisse / 1935

ROYAL BLUE linen has the brilliant vibrancy of the Mediterranean Sea as it stretches outwards into an infinite horizon of azure blue. French painter Henri Matisse spent the majority of his life in Nice, where this same limitless blue light filtered into his mind’s eye, to be reimagined on canvas as fields of electrifying ultramarine. He wrote, “It is with colour that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.”

Woman with a Hat / Henri Matisse / 1905 / Oil on canvas

As a student in Paris, the young Matisse was taught by Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, who taught his students to passionately feel colours within, instructing them, “Colours must be thought, dreamed, imagined.” In 1905 Matisse spent a summer painting with Andre Derain in the French coastal town of Collioure, where together they developed the Fauvist style, painting with pure, unbridled colour as they soaked up the intense, sun soaked colours around them. Matisse made Woman with a Hat, 1905 during this time, a cacophonous celebration of vivid, unmixed colours that seem to flicker and weave across the canvas with a life of their own, with deep blue taking centre stage as it circles the model’s face.

In the following years Matisse abandoned his earlier expressionist style of painting in favour of simplified forms, dark outlines and flat planes of colour influenced by Japanese prints and Moroccan textiles. In Dance, 1910, a series of joyous red figures hum and ripple with optical vibrancy when placed against an endless blue sky that slowly melts into green grass below.

Dance / Henri Matisse / 1910 / Oil on canvas

Matisse visited Morocco between 1912 and 1913, where the flattened forms and heightened colours of Islamic art had a profound influence on his work. He painted Window at Tangier, 1912 as one of a series exploring the interior/exterior relationship, where a mysterious blue landscape seems to flood like rippling water through the open window and colour the space inside, broken apart by smatterings of yellow, gold and burnt orange.

Window at Tangier / Henri Matisse / 1912 / Oil on canvas

While Matisse was not directly involved in the war, the tumultuous world event inevitably had an impact on his paintings, which shifted towards a more sombre, muted palette. As the end of the war emerged, so too did Matisse’s love of bright colour. He moved to Nice in 1917, where, like many artists, he found in the South of France’s warm, cloudless blue skies and deep blue seas a place of healing and tranquillity. In his paintings outdoor light continued to filter into and colour indoor spaces, as seen in Interior with a Violin, 1918, where a hint of blue light streams in through slatted shutters and provides a pop of colour as it hits the interior of a violin case.

Icarus / Henri Matisse / 1947 / Pochoir print

In the next few decades Matisse developed his much loved, distinctive cut and paste method, producing spirited, vibrantly coloured collages and ‘pochoir’ prints with a child-like sense of play and wonder. Icarus, 1947, situates the mythological figure of Icarus as a black silhouette against a night-time, ultramarine blue sky, beset with twinkling yellow stars, while his famous Blue Nude series, made in 1952, reduces the female form to a series of streamlined shapes and patterns in iridescent blue on white.

Vence Chapel Stained Glass Windows / Henri Matisse / 1951

In 1947, aged, 77, Matisse began designs for a chapel in the town of Vence on the French Riviera, known today as the Vence Chapel, or the Matisse Chapel. Built and decorated between 1949 and 1951, Matisse designed the chapel as a simple white interior to house his cut and paste style stained glass windows, along with murals, furnishings and even priests’ clothing. As a final bid to bring the outside in, Matisse’s stained glass windows in fresh, azure blue are set alight by golden French sunlight as it glitters and sparkles through their transparent surface like light through water. In this self-proclaimed ”crowning achievement”, Matisse creates a sacred, contemplative space to unite the Riviera sky, Mediterranean Sea and holy Madonna into one, a powerful and lasting paean to the place he called home.

Weisser Klang (White Sound), 1909, Sotheby’s

Wassily Kandinsky lived and breathed colour, letting it infiltrate his entire life. His impassioned, ferocious paintings are a testament to this, with their noisy, clanging clashes of dazzling brilliance that exude a spirit of endless optimism and hope. He was a great leader in the 20^th century European avant-garde, taking art into the great and unchartered territory of abstraction. The smoky, soft pink of LILAS appeared often in Kandinsky’s art, a dreamy, mysterious shade lifted from his imagination that he brought into sun-soaked bodies, sketchy mountaintops and even the ambiguous haze of abstract space.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1886, and raised from the age of five in Odessa, Russia. His childhood was filled with art, poetry and music, setting a precedent for the brilliance to come. Even so, Kandinsky initially trained in law and economics at the University of Moscow, and it wasn’t until he was 30 years old that he decided to change course and begin pursuing a career in the arts. One of the catalysts for this life change was the work of the French Impressionists that went on display in Russia in 1895; their vibrant, light-infused canvases immediately captured Kandinsky’s imagination. Kandinsky also fell in love with Russian folk art, and it was these two forces that came to define his early art.

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After training in the arts in Russia, Kandinsky later began travelling throughout Europe and northern Africa. 1909 was a pivotal year for the artist, who had by now settled in Munich and become a founding member of the ‘New Artists Association’, which focussed on radical, avant-garde practices. The painting Weisser Klang (White Sound), 1909 typified the artist’s approach to painting during this time, lifting imagery from the real world, which became heightened and distorted for dramatic effect. As referenced in the title, the sonorous effects of colour were beginning to spark Kandinsky’s interest, and shades of pink ranging from fuchsia to dusty rose blend into one another here like overlapping passages of mellow sound.

Herbstlandschaft (Autumn Landscape), 1911, Sotheby’s

In 1911 Kandinsky founded the radical artist group ‘The Blue Rider’ alongside his fellow artist Franz Marc, and together they bounded off closer and closer into the realms of pure abstraction. The painting Herbstlandschaft (Autumn Landscape) 1911 reveals a new approach in Kandinsky’s art, which was becoming simpler and sparer, with bold, calligraphic lines and streaks of intense, expressive colour. Yellow is the overriding colour here in this fantastical, imaginary landscape, but it is cut into with dabs of soft pink that temper its bright intensity with soft warmth.

Scharf-Ruhig, 1927, Christie’s

In the 1920s Kandinsky moved to Berlin to take up teaching at the new Bauhaus School. During this time Kandinsky abandoned his earlier expressionism for a language of simplified geometry, composed of brightly coloured shards and planes that seem to shift and float through abstract space. Yet the defining principles of his earlier art, namely the sonorous effects of colour and the experimentation with abstraction remained a cornerstone to his practice. In Scharf-Ruhig, 1927, Kandinsky toys with the boundaries between realism and abstraction, suggesting an interior space lit by a distant, gridded window on the right, while abstract circular and triangular shapes float free beyond it. His command of the order and balance between colours is masterful here, merging dark blue and golden shades in the background with just one glowing orb of radiant pink, a tone that shifts from brilliant hot pink to a calm and neutral rose.

Zersetzte Spannung (Disintegrated Tension), 1930, Christie’s

Zersetzte Spannung (Disintegrated Tension), 1930 is even more abstract and geometric, a curious myriad of shapes that take us on a journey around the painting’s surface. A red bullseye pulls us towards the centre left, a colour that is softened by a scumbled patch of rose pink nearby. This small passage of dusty pink might seem subtle, but it is just enough to bring a warm tactility into the painting, suggesting just the faintest trace of lingering human presence.

Fruits dans un plat, 1924, Christie’s

Cubist painter Georges Braque celebrated the ambient power of warm, naturalistic colours throughout his career, bringing rich and appealing earthy tones like LODEN GREEN into many of his most famous paintings. A pioneering French Cubist alongside Pablo Picasso, Braque’s limited hues initially gave him room to focus on wildly experimental designs without letting bright colours distract his attention. But over time these colours became his trademark style, and he really relished in their harmonious, atmospheric possibilities. Greens nestled in amongst shades of brown, grey and black became radiant warmth, conveying fresh shoots of new plant life, ripe fruits or shafts of sunlight streaming through open windows.

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Braque was born in the small community of Argenteuil, France in 1882. His family owned a house painting firm and both Braque’s father and grandfather worked as amateur artists, which may well have influenced Braque’s later decision to become an artist himself. When Braque was 8, his family moved to Le Havre, and it was here that Braque first began taking art evening classes at the Le Havre Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 15. When Braque was 17, he trained as a house painter and interior designer, with a view to continuing in the family trade, but by 1902 he had realised his deeper desire to become an artist. After studying at the Parisian Ecole des Beaux Arts, Braque set out to become a painter in early 20^th century Paris.

Nature morte à la pipe (Nappe rayée), 1932, Christie’s

Braque cycled through various styles in his early career, picking up influences from Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist structuralism, and the expressive painterliness of Fauvism.  But it was the friendship he struck up with Picasso in around 1907 that would have the most profound impact. Working side-by-side, the pair spearheaded the Cubist movement, envisioning shattered forms and splintered designs that challenged pictorial conventions and ushered in a new way of seeing the world. Still life and landscape were his favoured subjects, simple, traditional themes transformed entirely with his radical and subversive eye.

By the 1920s, Braque had earned international stature as a leading figure in the radical School of Paris. By the time he painted the brooding Fruits dans un plat, 1924, Braque had settled in a new studio in the Parisian district of Montparnasse. The ambient glow of this painting seems to reflect Braque’s growing contentment in life, with rich, syrupy browns in the background cradling ripe fruit in golden shades of green and yellow.

Le Modèle, 1939, Christie’s

Braque bought a house on the stylish Parisian Left Bank in 1928, and in 1930 he acquired a second home, a country cottage on the Normandy coast. His paintings from this period became increasingly stylised and playful, incorporating areas of flat pattern and decoration with his trademark geometric compositions. Nature morte à la pipe (Nappe rayée), 1932 combines muted shades of beige, grey, black and white with sharp passages of ripe green, which sing out with warmth and radiance in this quiet interior. In Le Modèle, 1939, Braque brings a female model into his still interior, while allusions to musical instruments and sheet music appear around her. Braque’s favourite earthy green emerges from her torso and legs, suggesting a warm shaft of sunlight coming from the window in the centre of the scene.

La Treille, 1953-4, Christie’s

The later painting La Treille, 1953-4 is the view through an interior space into an outdoor garden beyond. Table, walls and chairs seem to overlap one another in a complex myriad of creative possibilities, subtly transmuting through various shades of beige and grey. Much like many of his earlier paintings, a natural, warm green is the defining feature here, forming flame-like sparks of life across the central plant’s curling leaves. In Braque’s hands they seem to flicker in and out of the sunlight, enticing us outwards into the garden beyond.

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