‘’Arman, why do you paint like that?’’ This is the question which the first Venezuelan modernist painter, Armando Reverón (1889–1954) sought to escape when he began leading a self- imposed Robinson Crusoe existence in the Caribbean village Macuto. Although an eccentric and a schizophrenic, Reverón spent the major part of…

The Situationist International (SI) was a revolutionary postwar group, founded in 1957 by French Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord and Danish artist Asger Jorn. Operating primarily in Paris, the SI was a truly international organization within the scope of Europe and North Africa, which developed a critique of late…

Han van Meegeren (1889–1947) remains in history as the creator of the most scandalous forgeries of 17th-century artworks by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. An alleged Nazi collaborator, a drug addict, a promising artist, victim of unjustified criticism, Van Meegeren has been the subject of much art historical debate. …

The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti has entered the art historical canon as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Primarily active in Paris, Giacometti’s early work was conceived under the sign of Surrealism. It centred on the repressed subconscious, enigmatic subject matter, sexuality and aggression. Nevertheless, the…

Leon Ferrari is the only twentieth century artist who dedicated a major part of his artistic oeuvre to deconstructing the relationship between the Christian notion of Hell and human violence. His work opposes the tendency of understanding the post-war era as a period of desacralisation and predominant secularism. Examining the…

Hungarian photographer Gyula Halász, more widely known as Brassaï (1899–1984), formed an integral part of the artistic scene of Paris between the two world wars, creating some of the most striking examples of night photography. Brassaï’s oeuvre was eclectically influenced by Surrealism, Italian Baroque, French Realism, and European literature, articulating…

‘Light is the life of everything it touches’. These words were the guiding principle of the oeuvre of the Spanish luminist painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923), whose prolific artistic output is paradigmatic of the varying modernist tendencies of fin-de-siecle Europe. Luminism in itself, a term often criticized by art…

Proclaimed by Pablo Neruda ‘perhaps the greatest of all Mexican painters’, María Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco. She was active at a time when Muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco (also known as ‘los tres grandes’ or…

Lygia Pape (1929–2004) proved to be one of the most prominent Brazilian artists of the 20th century. Her work is marked by a shift from a formalist concern with geometric abstraction to a multimedia approach, encompassing installation, performance, video and conceptual art. Pape’s early years (1940s-50s) were characterized by her…