Erisava
@erisava, Joined July 2026The Erisava team. We post public artworks — from museum collections and from the street — to get the conversation started.
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Woman with a hat by Henri Matisse, 1905
This showed at a Paris salon alongside a handful of painters using color this wild — critics apparently called them 'the wild beasts,' and the nickname (Fauves) stuck.
Erisava: Does this still work as a portrait, or is it just wild color?
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Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray by Piet Mondrian, 1921
He turned a square canvas onto its corner to hang like a diamond — not a one-off trick, he kept coming back to the format for years.
Erisava: Why hang a square canvas like a diamond instead of straight?
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Mäda Primavesi (1903–2000) by Gustav Klimt, 1912
This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.
Erisava: I love the colors but there is something unsettling in the child's look.
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Kun ystävyyssuhteet solmitaan by Wäinö Aaltonen, 1948
Apparently it stands for the twin-town friendship between Turku and Gothenburg, and there are two of them — the original in one city and a copy in the other. You'll come across this one by the market square at Puutori.
Erisava: Is the statue really that green?
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The Repast of the Lion by Henri Rousseau, 1907
He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.
Erisava: Those plants look like houseplants that got out of hand.
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884
Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.
Erisava: Nobody in this park looks like they're having any fun. What's it all for?
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Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved) by James Ensor, 1917
Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, and he never really stopped painting them after that. This one comes out of the war years, when food was short across occupied Belgium — which the title seems to be having a go at.
Erisava: What's happened to everyone's face here?
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Runner in the City by El Lissitzky, 1926
Apparently this is from a stretch in the mid-1920s when Lissitzky put the geometric shapes aside for a while and started cutting up photographs instead, trying to get a still picture to hold something moving. People point to this kind of layering as an early step toward the collage-heavy propaganda photography that came out of the Soviet Union not long after.
Erisava: My phone could do this in a second, but I've never seen anything like it.
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Dance II by Henri Matisse, 1910
A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.
Erisava: The whole thing's three colours. I can't decide if that's bold or just easy.
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The Young Christ by Alexej von Jawlensky, 1920
He spent the last stretch of his career painting the same face over and over — hundreds of versions, from what I've read, each one flatter and more stripped back than the one before it.
Erisava: Could anyone have done this in an afternoon?
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Dropped Cone by Claes Oldenburg, 2001
According to the city's tourism site, this one was commissioned by the shopping centre it's balanced on, taking its cue from all the ice cream stands doing business on the street below. Apparently the tilted tip was meant to echo the church spires on the skyline nearby — a mall dressed up, half-jokingly, as a cathedral of consumption.
Erisava: This is basically an ice cream ad with extra steps.
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Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Supposedly he painted this right after leaving hospital — the print behind him nods to the Japanese woodblocks he collected.
Erisava: That green coat is the deepest color in the whole thing, but his stare is what stops you.
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New York City I by Piet Mondrian, 1941
This one's built from strips of coloured tape rather than paint, and it was never finished. A curator worked out a few years back that it's likely been hanging upside down since the 1940s — and from what I've read they're leaving it that way, because the tape has gone so fragile that turning it now could take the whole thing apart.
Erisava: Loud colours, no picture. Am I missing something, or is the grid the whole idea?
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Vedette in Hamburg by Albert Marquet, 1909
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.
Erisava: The sea here is the colour of lentil soup, and I keep looking at it anyway.
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The Procession, Seville by Francis Picabia, 1912
Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.
Erisava: I think this is trying to overwhelm you on purpose.