Art in the 20^th Century has changed drastically. In the following pages I shall investigate the works of four artists representing the last 100 years, starting with arguably the most famous of them, Pablo Picasso. The artists have been chosen because I feel each of them has played an important role in art this century. I shall then compare the artist’s works and decide which part of this century produced the greatest masterpieces. To finish off this study I shall design and create a model room inspired by and featuring works from the four artists in this study. With a new century starting in a matter of months, a room designed using art of the previous century seems a perfect way to mark this most important date.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

"Unlike in music there are no child prodigies in painting. What people regard as premature genius is the genius of childhood. It gradually disappears as they get older. It is possible for such a child to become a real painter one day, perhaps even a great painter. But he would have to start right from the beginning. So far as I am concerned, I did not have this genius" claimed Pablo Picasso. This is from a man who painted First Communion in 1895/96 - a painting so stunningly brilliant, due to the ultra fine painting skills which he displayed, that Picasso would have gone down in history as a superb painter on the strength of this one painting alone. One assumes an adult would need very many years practice in order for them to paint to as high a standard as Picasso could paint at the tender age of 14.

In Picasso’s earlier pieces, there is more emphasis on the photograph-like quality of his painting, but as Picasso grew into his 20’s his painting technique seemed to change - his new pieces far from the very fine paintings he did as a teenager. The Absinth Drinker, which he painted at the still relatively young age of 20, is a prime example. Every brush stroke is clearly defined but roughly painted - this does not, however, stop it being a brilliant painting, even though it is completely different compared to his earlier works. When Picasso reached 22, his painting style changed again. Although he did not revert back to his old style, his portraits are much more realistic at this age - La Vie and The Tragedy are prime examples of this. This has been called his Blue period, as the paintings have a predominantly blue/green colouring. A couple of years later, his artistic direction changed again. In paintings such as Woman with a Crow, Tumblers (Mother and Son) and Girl In A Chamise, all of which are portraits (The vast majority of Picasso’s works were portraits), the faces of the people have been painted in great detail, but all the rest of the canvas’ are hazily painted with large blocks of colour, and not very fine detail.

At the age of 26 came what Picasso is probably most famous for. On cubism Picasso said "What was particularly important about cubism was what you wanted to do… And you cannot paint that". Ten years of his cubism phase created some of the most important pieces of work in this century - always original, always completely different to everything seen before. Self Portrait features very bold, black lines, with thick patches of colour in between them. Just like his works from six years prior to this painting, there is some messy use of the oil on this canvas - every brush stroke can be easily seen. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a typical cubist piece, with the trademark blocks of colour and thick black lines. What makes this piece extremely bizarre is the female models’ faces - instead of the very finely drawn/painted faces we had grown accustomed to from Picasso’s earlier works - two of the girls have long, grey bridges to their noses and grey/black striped cheeks. Portrait of Ambroise Vollard and Woman with Pears (Fernande) are perfect examples of cubism - both are painted almost entirely with straight lines, with extensive use of grey and black.

When Picasso was 32 he started dabbling in pop art - two of his pictures of guitars, Guitar and Still Life with Guitar, are perfect examples. Guitar was made using a piece of blue paper with crudely cut scraps of paper roughly pasted onto it, with charcoal and chalk used to emphasise the lines of the guitar. Still Life with Guitar on the other hand uses uneven polygons filled with vibrant colours and, at times, cross hatching, completely lacking perspective (like most of his cubist work) and barely resembling a guitar at all (with the exception of the bridge, which has been more clearly represented on the canvas).

When Women Running on the Beach was painted, Picasso was 41. As with Sleeping Peasants, painted three years earlier, this painting shows that post-cubism-Picasso shows a much more traditional style of painting, though Women Running on the Beach is not the typical subject matter for a traditional painting - it features two large women running hand in hand along a beach whilst wearing revealing clothing. Just as it looks like Picasso is returning to a ‘normal’ style of painting, at the age of 51 he paints Woman with a Flower - one of the most unusual paintings of this century. The colours perfectly obscure for a portrait - red, orange, green, blue, yellow and lots of purple - set against a grey background. The two most intriguing parts of this masterpiece are the face (purple with a black eye-brow made out of one long line, similar to Liam Gallagher’s upper facial hair, which also forms the woman’s nose. The eyes are exactly the same as the eyes which are drawn for comic strips and cartoons and the mouth is simple a circle within a circle - the lips are cut up into small sections) and the woman’s breasts (Two grey spheres of different sizes, both in the conventional shoulder position! They also seem to have arms stemming from beneath them). This is my favourite of all Picasso’s paintings. The fact it was painted in 1932 proves just how ahead of his time he was - it looks much more like it is from the 1980s than the 1930s. Picasso continued in this style up until World War Two. During the war Picasso’s pieces were much, much darker than what people had come to expect from him - his war-time works depicted death and crying, and in the case of Still Life with Steer’s Skull, an extremely disturbing picture of a skull on a table next to a black window.

From the end of the war until his death in 1973, Picasso seemed to draw together all the techniques which he had pioneered over the year. His paintings were generally a lot more colourful, and featured some very exciting pieces including a copy of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass entitled Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet - his version is made up from a lot more green and white than the original. The brush strokes are very broad compared to Manet’s intricate painting style.

Picasso’s skills were not limited to painting. He also made some stunning sculptures, ceramics and posters, but will always be much more famous for masterpieces such as Weeping Woman and Self Portrait with a Palette

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

In 1926 Dalí met Picasso. Five years later he painted his most famous, though perhaps not his best, painting - The Persistence Of Memory. Dalí was obviously influenced by Picasso’s original stance on painting, and took it to another level. Dalí was famous for his surreal works, even though he was expelled from the surrealist movement in 1939. From the beginning his paintings had surreal elements. Take Cadaques (The place Dalí went each summer for his holidays) for example. This splendid piece was painted when Dalí was just 19 years of age. Unlike his later works, this painting is of a regular landscape, but painted in a unique fashion. The trees in the foreground do not have branches covered in leaves - instead they have many large leaves of about 1 metre in length. People are painted without detail, and the background is made out of tiny blocks (Dalí was directly influenced by Picasso for this piece - he was fascinated by cubism, and you can clearly see the his usage of this technique in this particular painting), with dark shadows. Another fine example of Dalí’s early work is his 1927 piece Apparatus and Hand - against a vast, blue sky and sea is painted a bizarre creature consisting of a white cheese-wedge shaped head resting on a vaguely cylindrical torso with limbs made out of long, thin triangular prisms. The creature’s hair is in the form of a red rubber glove which seems to be attracting tiny objects like a magnet. In the background, hundreds of birds flock together in the shame of the creature’s head. A naked woman is partially drawn on the left of the panel (This painting is Oil on panel, as opposed to Oil on canvas - Dalí’s usual format), as well as a partially drawn donkey. A woman who has been sliced up into triangles stands to the right of the creature.

A decade or so later, Dalí painted Slumber. "For Slumber to be possible, a whole system of crutches in psychic equilibrium is needed" he said about one of his most famous, and most influential works. As paintings go, this one is very strange, but it is typical of Dalí’s style. An elongated face is supported by wooden poles. Behind the face is a deep blue to grey tonal gradation. The whole piece is painted very smoothly - an airbrush effect has been used throughout the picture, with the exception of a distant hill-side village and a dog with its master. The dog also is supported by the trademark wooden poles. Another classic from this era is Sun Table from 1936, which features boats in the middle of a desert - this is a reoccurring theme throughout many Dalí masterpieces. Although Allegory of an American Christmas has many opportunities for the legitimate placement of a boat or two (At least half of the painting is of water), there is not a single boat. This was painted on Dalí’s first trip to the United States in 1934. The Earth has been painted in the shape of an egg. Only the American continent can be seen, and North America has been destroyed by a plane crashing straight through it. A naked body beneath the ‘egg’ reaches up towards the hole which used to be the most powerful country in the world. This shows how political Salvador Dalí can be - there is a political element to almost every one of Dalí’s paintings.

A new decade, and a new style. Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages), from 1940 is a painting of the heads of an elderly man, a young man, and a child, all rested on stands. But, with Mr Dalí’s immense talent, he has not painted these people at all - instead he has painted a landscape from behind a tall castle wall with women standing, sitting and crouching on the stands instead. It is reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s drawings, but shrouded with the traditional Dalí surreal images, such as the alien-like woman posing on the far right of the painting. A year later, Tristan and Isolde is painted. This is a disturbing piece featuring an orchard in a desert. The whole picture is littered with skulls and with bones. In common with many paintings from this time of his life, Dalí signed this painting Gala Salvador Dalí.

The Arrival (Port Lligat) was painted at the beginning of the 1950s. It is painted in a more classical style, but still with elements of cubism in the hills, and surreal deformed angels in the foreground. Signed with merely Dalí, it is not one of his greatest works, but is very different to his previous paintings. Instead of the traditional airbrush effect which Dalí usually employed for both sea and sky, both these features are painted in detail. Sun rays seep through a gap in the clouds, and you can see the sunlight reflected in the ripples of the water. In Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity however we see Dalí doing what he does best - very surreal paintings. This one in particular, from 1954, is of a woman leaning over a metal bar in a window of, what one assumes is, a ship. The woman, who is topless, and wearing tights, is slightly transparent in places. Obscure cone-like shapes have been sliced into leg-sized pieces and are interlaced with the naked woman. The clouds in this painting are unusually very realistic.

In the 50’s and early 60’s Dalí painted some fantastic religious works. One of the best paintings from this period is undoubtedly The Madonna of Port Lligat - here you see Gala (Helena Deluvina Diakonoff, Dalí’s favourite model), with a pose reminiscent of the classic Virgin Mary portraits. Gala has parts of her arms missing, a slice of her head removed and almost her entire torso has vanished. Residing inside the hole in her centre is baby Jesus hovering over a deep green velvet cushion. This piece, which was presented to Pope Pius XII in 1949, is quite clearly a surreal religious work - it is very rare for surreal takes on religion to be accepted by the Christian church, as such paintings often border on the line of offensiveness, but for the head of the Catholic church to accept this painting as a gift, especially from someone who was not a devout Catholic, proves just how talented and respected Dalí was. Surrounding Gala is a stone archway, with much of the supports missing, yet still floating in mid air. In common with the majority of Dalí’s best known works, the sky and sea have light-to-dark tonal gradations throughout the canvas, smoothly painted in oil.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-?)

Between 1962 and 1964 Roy Lichtenstein was directly inspired by Pablo Picasso. Although Picasso had undoubtedly influenced the man for most of his life, it was not until the early 60’s that he acknowledged Picasso’s influence with paintings such as Femme au Chapeau from ’62. This painting clearly shows the angular face which occurred in many of Picasso’s famous portraits. Lichtenstein’s famous cartoon drawing techniques are not too distant from Picasso’s outlining of figures in black, and his practice of drawing two dimensional objects as flat shapes. Lichtenstein does not feel any shame in his blatant copy of Picasso’s work, such as his piece Femme d’Algier. He said "Picasso made the Femme d’Algier from Delacroix’s painting, and then I did my painting from his", which is a perfectly reasonable statement to make. It is not clear whether Picasso himself objected to such paintings, but Lichtenstein was not looked upon favourably from everyone in the art world - some people accusing him of caricaturising Picasso’s masterpieces. We must remember that Picasso himself developed cubism straight from Cézanne’s paintings - all the greatest artists are inspired by those who have come before them.

Cézanne is another artist who has inspired Lichtenstein a great deal. Portrait of Madame Cézanne from 1962 is made up of the outline of Madame Cézanne, with a giant double-headed arrow following the line of her spine. The picture is split up with dotted lines and more arrows. Each arrow is lettered from A to E. This strange painting was a copy of an analytical diagram from an old book about Cézanne. The black lines of this canvas are reminiscent of those used in the cartoons which he loves so much to draw and paint. Piet Mondrian also influenced Lichtenstein, but not to the extent of Picasso or Cézanne. Golf Ball, from 1962 - a very famous and influential piece, was inspired very much by Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean from 1915.

Of course, Lichtenstein is not an unoriginal artist. In the 1960’s, Lichtenstein created some of the most interesting paintings of the 20^th century, such as I Know…Brad from 1963. The painting is of a pretty young woman sitting next to a building support, with trees behind her. Painted in the style of a cartoon, with a thought-bubble proclaiming "I know how you must feel, Brad" coming from the woman’s head. The most delightful part of this canvas are the Benday Dots. Even Andy Warhol was envious of Lichtenstein’s Benday Dots. These dots are a characteristic of the comic books which were copied by the artist. Nobody else realised that the dots could be transformed into such splendid works of art. These dots are focused on in much greater detail in the wonderful Magnifying Glass which is simply a page of dots, with a giant magnifying glass in the centre, enlarging some of the dots a great deal. Even more tremendous is Study For Preparedness, in this canvas, the Benday Dots in some places get gradually smaller, giving a cylindrical effect.

An unusual set of three panels, in the form of a comic strip, has perhaps become Lichtenstein’s most famous masterpiece. As I Open Fire from 1964, begins with an old American aeroplane’s spinning propeller, accompanied with the caption "As I opened fire, I knew why Tex hadn’t buzzed me…If he had…" followed by "The enemy would have been warned" on the second panel. The focus of the painting has moved slightly down the plane and onto the plane’s machine guns. The final panel is a close up on the machine guns, with the sentence ending "That my ship was below them" at the top of the canvas.

Lichtenstein is not only remarkable at painting Benday Dots - he is also notable for his two tone striped painting technique. The Artist’s Studio - with Model from 1974 is a perfect example of this. Painted during his Art Deco period, the floor is filled with perfectly painted parallel blue lines. The shadows on this painting are actually painted in white, as black has been used for the outlines of the objects that make up this superb picture. Unusually, there is a naked woman in this painting. The vast majority of Lichtenstein’s paintings feature merely objects or patterns, and seldom people, let alone naked people.

Ten Dollar Bill is an amusing counterfeit ten dollar note from 1956, made with a lithograph in an unusually rough style - the cross hatching is particularly erratic in comparison to his perfectly spaced shading utilised in later paintings. The picture is dark green/black and is in a cartoon style which has been copied everywhere since - the fact that Lichtenstein has almost completely ignored what the note actually looks like, has led to alternative animators imitating that simplicity all over the world.

There are three more pieces from before the 1980’s which cannot go unmentioned. Look Mickey from 1961 - The classic image of Mickey Mouse laughing at Donald Duck whilst fishing from a pier set against a yellow backdrop. Lichtenstein’s colours are usually very bright - no tonal gradation is employed - for shading effects, Benday Dots are normally used, but most of his paintings have large blocks of colour, as used in all the main comic books from which Lichtenstein took his inspiration. Another classic is Explosion No.1 from 1965 - one of the many visually stunning sculptures from Lichtenstein. This is made out of coloured steel, with red mesh used to create the Benday Dots effect. This is a typical cartoon style explosion from the period of time this was sculptured. White Brushstroke I from 1965 is a very cleverly painted comic-book-style Z-shaped stoke of paint against the backdrop of blue Benday Dots. The drips and brush marks have all been carefully painted on so that the overall impression is of a real, yet cartoon-like, brushstroke.

Roy Lichtenstein is still alive today, but his more recent works have been of little significance in comparison to his earlier masterpieces. Red Barn through the Trees from 1984 has some of the traditional Lichtenstein elements such as the thick, black lines, but this time oil has been roughly painted on top of the magna. The overall effect is a painting which is exciting, and original, but not pleasing to look at - a quality which all his earlier famous pieces had. Other paintings from that era suffered the same fate - with only the 1986 piece Mural with Blue Brushstroke living up to the quality of his earlier works - infact it has elements of almost all his best works - the Benday Dots, the parallel lines, the brushstroke, the sunset.. An excellent piece which he has not bettered since.

Damien Hirst (1965-?)

Damien Hirst was born at the same time Dalí and Lichtenstein were painting some of their finest works, and Picasso was still painting excellent canvas’. It took him 23 years to make a mark on the art world - a lot longer than both Dalí and Picasso, but much earlier than Lichtenstein. He was the star Goldsmiths’ College, but his status of trendiest British artist seems to be limited to just a decade, as he has been notably left out of Cream - the book charting the 100 artists from all over the world which are most likely to be influential in the next century. It seems fitting that, in all likelihood, all four artists’ best works will be created in this century.

Alone Yet Together was sold by Damien Hirst in 1989 for £500. A Perspex cabinet filled with 100 blocks of formaldehyde, each with a small goldfish inside. The overall effect is of a clinical arrangement of variously shaped fish, which is extremely bizarre and unusual. On October 9^th 1998 the same work was sold for £85,000. God - a medicine cabinet full of various drugs, with a glass front, which Hirst originally sold for £500, became his most valuable piece, fetching an extraordinary £188,500 when sold at auction in April 1998.

For his early exhibitions, Hirst made very cruel works of art. A Thousand Years is immoral sculpture where insects hatch, live, and then get killed by an insectecutor before they get a chance to have a free existance. For In and Out of Love, Hirst gently stuck butterfly pupae onto his canvas’ so that they would hatch during the exhibition and die in the artificial environment. In Waiting For Inspiration, Red, the insectecutor waits until the insects have entered a small hole. When the insect has been killed, the dead body falls onto a canvas which is permanently wet in order to collect any insect that should fall onto it. These three nasty sculptures are seldom talked about now, as Damien has many celebrity friends (Pop stars such as Blur, Keith Allen, Rod Steward . David Stewart has even written a song about him entitled "Damien, Save Me")which would be upset if they knew the terrible things which he had done at the start of the decade. Damien says that when people view these sculptures, they should "become uncomfortable when you realise that you’re like a metaphor for the fly".

In 1992, fame and fortune was destined for stardom as he was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize. His now legendary shark in a tank was commissioned for a staggering £45,000 by Saatchi. The fierce looking mammal was suspended in a deep tank of formaldehyde, and, at the time, was extremely original - nobody had ever seen anything like it before - it was a symbol of art in the early 1990’s. Two years on, and Hirst had not got over his infatuation with all things formaldehyde - his latest exhibit was a dead sheep, then worth £25,000, which was tragically destroyed by vandals who were offended by Hirst’s extensive use of dead animals. Far from destroying Hirst, my opinion is that the vandals added the controversy and publicity which Hirst craves.

This led to Hirst winning the 1995 Turner Prize for his £140,000 ‘masterpiece’ Mother and Child, Divided, a cow and calf sliced in half and preserved in four tanks of formaldehyde which was perceived by some members of the public as sick due to the fact that an animal was cut in half - the fact that many of the people criticising the piece would gladly eat beef without hesitation went unnoticed. I personally think the concept of cutting a cow in half is very intriguing, and it is excellent that the general public were given the opportunity to walk straight through the gap between the formaldehyde tanks and see what the inside of a cow looks like. Regardless of what his critics have said, this is a very original piece, but led to subsequent formaldehyde having less impact.

Damien Hirst is not a ‘conventional’ artist by any means. His talent is not confined simply to canvas or sculpture. Hirst made a film entitled Hanging Around in 1996, designed and co-owns with the stunning Pharmacy restaurant/bar - the whole establishment is decorated with numerous medical items such as medicine cabinets, pill boxes, ointment cases and medical displays in the windows. The Pharmacy faced a £1000 fine from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society for misuse of the name "The overriding concern is that members of the public can always be confident that, when they see the Pharmacy sign, they can obtain a professional pharmacy service and bona fide medicines". According to the bar cocktail list there are most certainly bona fide medicines, such as Detox and Voltenol Retarding Agent!

Hirst also co-owns Turtle-Neck Records - the label which released the multi-platinum Unofficial England World Cup 1998 hit single Vin-Da-Loo - and Damien even makes a brief appearance in the promotional video. The artwork for the single was all original work by Hirst - a shiny silver bucket full of curry with a blue background - inspired by the frequently repeated line in the song "Bucket of Vindaloo"; A photo of Hirst’s teeth and gums; A picture of a blue sky with Red Arrows flying through it. The vapour trail from one of the aeroplanes writes out Vindaloo across the sky. For the CD Picture disc, a spin painting was used. Damien has painted many spin paintings recently - they are made by pouring different colours of paint on spinning canvas’. This produces a weird swirl-like pattern, and have been sold for in excess of £60,000 recently.

Hirst has also published his first autobiography imaginatively entitled I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always at the unjustifiably high price of £59.95. Damien Hirst seems to have an unusually high interest in the financial side of the art world, in comparison to other contemporary artists who put more time into art than into making art than making money - Hirst’s restaurant, book, film and music video directing, and record label bring in much more money than just the sculptures and paintings alone. It must be frustrating, however, to see a creation of yours being sold on for £188,000 more than you were originally paid for it.

Conclusion

Picasso has painted some of the most original and unusual paintings of all time. Although his works may not be as bizarre as Dalí’s, or as innovative as Lichtenstein’s or as strange as Hirst’s, his pieces are of pure genius - would the others have got anywhere without Picasso setting the trend? The answer is no. Picasso quite clearly led the way for Lichtenstein - whose paintings were often directly influenced by Picasso. Dalí’s paintings were much more surreal than those of Picasso, but were often too bizarre. Picasso found different methods of painting objects, such as cubism. Dalí painted everything in a more traditional and accepted fashion, but merely changed fundamental features of the subjects to add make his masterpieces so surreal. So far Hirst has not inspired anyone other than pop musicians - all the other artists have had massive influence on the majority of artists in their particular fields that have come after them. His works are all brilliant, but have done nothing to change the art world - he has just employed existing techniques in his own style. One could argue that Hirst’s overuse of formaldehyde is no different to Lichtenstein’s constant use of Benday Dots - both Benday Dots and formaldehyde had been used widely before any artist had touched them, but it was their focus on the respective mediums which has given them critical acclaim. But, I believe that the artistic talent that was required for Lichtenstein to paint each Benday Dot so precisely outweighs the ability to suspend a dead animal in formaldehyde. Lichtenstein’s art is stunning, but based more around other people’s art-work, than his own original creations. Dalí’s work was almost entirely made up in his own fantastically creative mind. Dalí is a greater artist than Lichtenstein overall, just as Lichtenstein is much more talented than Hirst in some respects. I consequently feel that Picasso is greater than Dalí, Lichtenstein and Hirst - he was original, highly influential, made thousands of high quality paintings, sketches and sculptures which were both entertaining to look at, and thought provoking yet not offensive. This shows how, although this century has produced many stunning pieces of art, and many great artists, the

standard of art was finest at during the 1950s and 1960’s where Picasso, Dalí and Lichtenstein were all painting and sculpting masterpiece after masterpiece. As the decade draws to a close, the emphasis in art from the likes of Hirst, who was not even born when the greatest paintings of the last 100 years were being painted, is to be deep and meaningful, without actually painting anything pleasing to the eye. It is perfectly acceptable to cut a cow in half in the name of art, but in 200 years time children will not be studying it in schools. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Dalí’s Old Age, Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages) and Lichtenstein’s I Know…Brad on the other hand, will be studied for eternity.