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Henri Matisse (1869-1954), The Inattentive Reader, detail, 1919, Oil on canvas, 730 x 924 cm, Bequeathed by Montague Shearman through the Contemporary Art Society 1940. Matisse painted this work during an extended stay in a hotel in Nice in the south of France. Although the woman was probably a professional model, Matisse creates a sense of casual intimacy, and uses details in this anonymous setting to touch on serious themes. The distracted reader assumes the head-in-hand pose traditionally associated with melancholy, while the flowers and mirror are reminders of the transience of life.

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
Liverpool
+44-151-702-7400
DLA Piper Series: International
Modern Art
Through
August 27, 2007

The first decades of the 20th century witnessed an unprecedented transformation of artistic styles and practices. Many artists became more concerned with form, colour and design than in trying to make realistic descriptions of the visible world. The works in this room follow this process of change through two very distinctive and contrasting genres — the domestic interior and the landscape.

The realistic depictions of figures within domestic interiors by artists such as Sir William Orpen, Edgar Degas and Gwen John give way to more formal concerns in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard and JD Fergusson. Such concerns find their culmination in the fractured forms of two paintings of a mantelpiece in Vanessa Bell's London home, one by Bell herself and the other by Duncan Grant. The objects in both scenes have been reduced to a series of abstract shapes, painted in highly keyed, non-naturalistic colours, showing an awareness of recent artistic developments in France such as Fauvism and Cubism.

A similar change takes place in the depiction of landscape. The Impressionist technique of recording the effects of light and atmosphere in the paintings of Camille Pissarro are taken further by Henri Matisse in his painting Notre-Dame. This is poised between Impressionism, with its atmospheric details, and his later Fauvist work with their touches of strong, sometimes seemingly arbitrary colour. This development culminates in Piet Mondrian's Sun, Church in Zeeland; Zoutelande Church Facade where the artist described his use of pure colour as a means, "to find a new way to express the beauty of nature."

The disorder and violence of the First World War was seen as a catalyst for a new direction in art — a return to tradition, figuration and classicism. This shift was described as 'the call to order,' a phrase coined by the influential poet and critic Jean Cocteau, writing in Paris in 1926. Seen as a rallying cry, it was taken up by avant-garde artists and critics of the time, initially in Paris and then throughout Europe.

Fundamental to this new classicism was a desire to revive and reinterpret classical ideals and universal themes. Art was inspired by antiquity, Greco-Roman sculpture, Greek mythology and the Italian Renaissance. This was accompanied by traditional subject matter: the still life, landscape, and the female nude. The nude was often presented as an object of desire for the male viewer, and expressed ideas and ideals of beauty and sensuality.

Both Picasso and Matisse were key players in the call to order. Picasso's links to classicism began in 1917 and lasted throughout the 1920s and early 30s (although he engaged with other art movements simultaneously during this period). Matisse settled in Nice in 1917 and his work became more naturalistic, and focused on the female model, often portrayed as an odalisque (a slave or concubine in a harem). Drawing upon classical and Renaissance sculpture, Matisse produced a number of monumental female nudes that evoked 'timeless' ideals of beauty and order.

Unlike the "call to order" that followed the end of the First World War, the prevailing mood in the aftermath of the Second World War was of a desire to start anew. Instead of a return to the classical values of the past, based on order and reason — values that many felt had been discredited by the War — artists around the world began to search for new forms of expression.

Traditional artistic qualities such as beauty and refinement, balance and harmony, were rejected in favour of a more "instinctive" approach to making art. Many artists resorted to spontaneous gestures in an attempt to find a universal form of expression. The almost complete disappearance of the human figure in this type of work, reflects not only a profound anxiety about the survival of the individual, but also a desire to make art free of conventional imagery.

Louise Bourgeois (born 1911), from Autobiographical Series, Children in Tub, 1994, Drypoint and aquatint on paper, 10.6 x 13.7cm, Purchased 1994, © Louise Bourgeois. Much of Bourgeois' work is autobiographical, and relates to her traumatic childhood. She idolised her mother, and loathed her overbearing, adulterous father. Bourgeois made her first prints in the 1940s and, after a gap of about forty years, returned to printmaking in 1990. Frequently child-like in style, these works portray the events and fantasies of her childhood and adolescence. The scenes include the trauma of birth, the pubescent discovery of the body, the moulding of a daughter by her mother, and the stifling of a daughter by her father.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Head of a Woman, 1924, Oil on canvas, 60.6 x 51.0 x 9.0cm, © Succession Picasso/DACS 2002. This small and intimate painting of an unknown woman incorporates many features of Picasso's later Cubist style. Thus the face of the woman is depicted frontally but her right eye is shown as though in profile. This suggestion that the sitter is being shown from two different viewpoints simultaneously is reinforced by Picasso's use of colour to divide the face into two distinct areas. The dark brown lines would first have been inscribed into the paint, possibly with the handle of a brush, and then the colour applied. This use of distinct lines overlaid on areas of colour is characteristic of Picasso's work of this period.

Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), The Mirror, 1900, Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm. The sitter in this portrait is Emily Scobel, a model from the Slade School of Art. Orpen was briefly engaged to her. The room is apparently an accurate portrayal of Orpen’s lodgings, but the shallow pictorial depth and ‘aesthetic’ arrangement of objects is based on Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother.The concave mirror on the wall reflects the artist painting at his easel. This is a device which Orpen borrowed from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage which he would have seen on display at the National Gallery.

Ron Mueck, Ghost, 1998, Fibreglass, silicon, polyurethane foam, acrylic fibre and fabric, 201.9 x 64.8 x 99.1 cm, © Ron Mueck. Australian born, Ron Mueck first came to public attention during the Royal Academy's 1997 Sensation exhibition. He has been living in Britain for sixteen years and began his career as a puppet maker. He is currently producing figurative sculpture in a hyper-realist style.Mueck's simulations of human subjects possess an eerie exactitude. He bases them on friends and relatives but does not directly cast from his subjects. Instead he makes works in fibreglass and silicone from maquettes modelled in clay. The distorted size and awkward posture often indicate the subject's emotional state. Ghost 1998, represents a seven-foot girl. Her enlarged scale and uneasy demeanour emphasise a sense of adolescent anxiety.

Many artists also rejected the materials traditionally associated with fine art. The use of substances such as household paint, tar, sweet wrappers, and even blood was due partly to the scarcity of materials after the war, but also to a belief that how art was made was more important than the resultant image.

The idea of the artist attempting a literal description of the world was replaced by a growing sense of confrontation between the artist and his materials, often so powerful, that creation sometimes became indistinguishable from destruction. The paint thrown and splashed, the pierced and gashed canvases, and the pitted and scarred sculptures all attest to a certain violence, that heightens the expressive power of the materials themselves.

In the mid 1950s artists in Europe and America began to reject the autonomy of Abstraction. Motivated by the post-war rise in consumerism and mass production, artists such as the Paris-based Nouveau Réalists sought alternative forms of expression that engaged directly with the grittiness of modern life.

Calling for "new approaches to the perception of the real," artists such as Arman, César, Martial Raysse and Jean Tinguely found a new expressive vocabulary through the use of found objects or "readymades." Raysse collected plastic consumer goods, enclosing them in totem-like containers stacked one on top of the other. César visited scrap yards, selecting pre-compressed car parts to present in specific configurations. Using actual objects rather than representations, the group made a "direct expression of a whole sector of modern life, that of the city, the street, the factory, of mass production."

Responding to the waste of consumerism, the Nouveau Réalists paradoxically also acted to preserve it. Contemporary consumer products were encapsulated for posterity or transformed into astute assemblages.

Whilst in many ways maintaining a stance similar to the Nouveau Réalists, their American counterparts, the Neo-Dadaists and later the Pop artists, took a more celebratory approach to their immediate urban environment. John Chamberlain, like César, used found car parts, although he presented them as things of beauty, playing with the painterly quality of their brightly coloured surfaces. Fascinated with mass production, Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg concerned themselves with ideas of abundance and replacement — however many cans of soup are consumed, there will always be more on the supermarket shelf …

Childhood is often assumed to be a benign state, a time of innocence and happy memories. It is portrayed as a time when imagination and fantasy are given free reign. Yet it is also the period of our greatest vulnerability, physically and emotionally it is far from "child's play."

Childhood can be a source of anxiety, traumatic memories and nightmares. It is when identity is most malleable, or in flux, during the process of being formed. In childhood we find the origins of our adult selves, so decisive experiences in childhood can lead to repressed fears and emotions. For many artists, such as Louise Bourgeois or Keith Edmier, childhood is crucial for an investigation into self-identity.

Two related areas have been critical in making childhood a key concern of contemporary artists: firstly psychoanalysis, which is employed as a way to retrieve information about early experiences from the subconscious and, secondly, Surrealism, which sought to foreground dreams, nightmares and childlike states.

Many works in this display draw on the experience of childhood or seemingly subvert "childish" imagery making forceful, powerful statements on modern life, as in the work of Grayson Perry and Marcel Dzama. Moreover, children’s games often mask cruelty and, in contemporary art, have served as a metaphor with which to examine the violence and aggression of the wider world, for instance in the work of Annette Messager or Jake and Dinos Chapman.