Andy Warhol was a very successful commercial illustrator. Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown.

In the early 1900s many artists tried various abstract ways of representing reality. Mondrian went beyond them.

Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist.

The fascinating and challenging images in Magritte's works stem from revelations of the mystery of the visible world.

Magritte, who was a painter and a painter tout court, albeit an unusual one, was nevertheless more aware than any of his contemporaries of words and of the dubious status they had acquired. His consciousness of words is evident in both his writings and paintings.

Constantin Brancusi
(1876-1956)

Brancusi was a Romanian sculptor who trained initially as a carpenter and stonemason.

While never entirely rejecting the natural world, Brancusi undoubtedly succeeds in conveying a sense of gravity by reducing his work to a few basic elements. Paradoxically, this process also tends to highlight the complexity of thought that has gone into its making.

Monumental, subtle and intimate, Brancusi’s sculptures are rightly now considered to be the work of a modern master.

Claude Monet
(1840-1926)

Monet is regarded as the Impresionist par excellence.

Monet never painted a nude, and one may suspect that his vast world of nature and the theme of water played in his art the role that the fantasy about women or children or mothers played in the imagination of other artists. All his variety, from the stillness of the lilly pond to the awful turbulence of waves beating on the rocks, may have to do with the feelings or passions that in other artists can be recognized in their mythology and subjects or through a fanciful imagery of human figures.