Yale University Art Gallery — New Haven, CT, USA

He's usually filed with the Fauves — the 'wild beasts' famous for screaming colour — but apparently what he actually loved was grey weather and busy water, and he spent years travelling around Europe painting one port after another.

According to Wikipedia she was one of a small wave of Norwegian women who moved to Paris in the twenties to study with Léger, and this comes from right in the middle of that stretch. Apparently she drifted back to more ordinary landscapes later on.

According to Wikipedia he's the one who said a painting, before it's a horse or a woman or a story, is basically flat colours on a surface — and then spent most of his career painting angels and gospel scenes anyway.

From what I've read he painted this in the middle of the war — he was Spanish, so he wasn't called up like most of his friends in Paris, and he just kept working straight through it.

This is the myth of Leander, who used to swim across the strait most nights to visit Hero — until a storm caught him and he drowned. What you're looking at is apparently the moment after: sea nymphs pulling his body from the water, with Hero said to have thrown herself in after him.

This is one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped 'lozenge' canvases — apparently he kept returning to the format through the late twenties and thirties, paring the paintings down until almost nothing was left on them. Naming it after a dance feels almost like a joke next to how little is actually happening on the canvas.

Apparently he really did sail out to the South Pacific and came back with a stack of scenes like this one. They say almost nobody took him seriously for decades — until Marcel Duchamp, of all people, started calling him a genius, which only half stuck.

This is from just before he gave up recognisable subjects altogether — a year or two on, he was painting pictures of nothing in particular and arguing they could work on you the way music does.

They say he kept a handwritten catalogue of every single thing he made, numbering each one as it left the easel — the pencilled line along the bottom edge is his own filing, not a museum label.

According to Wikipedia he spent the rest of his life painting heads — hundreds of them, getting simpler and simpler until they were barely faces at all. This one's from near the start of all that.

He called this series 'Proun' — supposedly short for a phrase meaning something like 'project for affirming the new.' From what I've read it was his attempt at a kind of painting that wasn't quite painting or architecture, more a rough sketch for spaces that didn't exist yet.

He was part of a group in Dresden that called itself the Bridge — apparently they shared a studio, painted their friends fast and cheap, and wanted nothing to do with the polite art of the day. It's said the group fell apart a year or so after this, partly over a history of it he wrote himself.

I couldn't find a full backstory on this one — it's usually filed alongside Bosch's other moralizing scenes about drinking and excess, but details on why it was made are thin.

He apparently spent decades loudly declaring himself a genius to anyone who'd listen and got nowhere — until Duchamp, of all people, picked him out of an exhibition and started championing him.

Apparently her sister ran one of the first modern-art societies in America, alongside Marcel Duchamp of all people, and a lot of paintings from that circle — this one included — ended up in the same collection.

From what I've read he made his name on enormous murals and Shakespeare illustrations — pictures built to carry a whole story from across a room. The three women here are the Marys from the Easter story, come to the tomb and finding it empty.

Apparently this is one of his earliest known paintings — from back when he was still learning from a couple of older Venetian painters.

Apparently he started out drawing news scenes for papers — sent to sketch things on the spot before photographs could do the job — and supposedly that fast, get-it-down habit never left him, even once he'd moved on to painting people like this.

Le Journal was a real Paris daily, apparently the one everybody read — and this crowd of painters stuck it into picture after picture, so often it's practically a signature.

I couldn't find much on this one specifically — from what I've read he turned out hundreds of small pieces around this time, sometimes several in a week, which seems like an unbelievable pace. If anyone knows more about this one, I'd love the story.