Van Gogh & company

Gris' subject matter always focused on his immediate surroundings; he produced still-lifes composed of simple, everyday objects, portraits of friends, and occasionally landscapes or cityscapes. In the 1920s, Gris designed costumes and scenery for Serge Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes." Before his death from asthma, he also completed some of the boldest and most mature statements of his Cubist style, with landscape still-lifes that compress interiors and exteriors into synthetic Cubist compositions.

Fernand Leger (1881-1955). Joseph Fernand Henri Leger was born in Argentan, France. After apprenticing with an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, Leger settled in Paris in 1900 and supported himself as a draftsman. He was refused entrance to L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but nevertheless attended classes there beginning in 1903; he also studied at the Academie Julian. Leger's earliest known works, which date from 1905, primarily were influenced by Impressionism. He became a practicing Socialist while fighting in the trenches of World War I, and his work there after was influenced profoundly by socialism and by his traumatic wartime experience.

In much of his mature work, Leger demonstrates his interest in the machine, and the idea of society-as-machine. His "mechanical" period, in which figures and objects are characterized by tubular, machine-like forms, began in 1917. He believed that painted images of the machine age could cut across the barriers of class and education--his was an oat for the common man in the street, not highly refined, but clear, definitive, pragmatic, and rooted in everyday experience.

Leger lived in the United States from 1940-45, but returned to France following World War II. In the decade before his death, his wide-ranging projects included book illustrations, monumental figure paintings and murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Mondrian was born in Amerfoort, Netherlands, and studied at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts. His early work was naturalistic, incorporating successive influences of academic landscape and still-life painting, Impressionism, and Symbolism. After seeing the works of Georges Braque and Picasso in Amsterdam in 1911, he moved to Paris and began to develop an independent abstract style.

Mondrian was a pioneer in the development of perhaps the most significant 20th-century innovation in artistic practice: Abstraction. During World War I, while living in the Netherlands, he reduced his work to simple blocks of color and geometric shapes, formulating his nonobjective Neo-Plastic style, which was based, he explained, on an absolute harmony of straight lines and pure colors underlying the visible world. His reputation rests on about 250 abstract paintings dating from 1917 to 1944. Each painting was worked and reworked, built layer by layer to ward "perfect" equilibrium of form, color, and surface.