The Atlas Collection
Travel posters
For places worth remembering. Modern prints inspired by favourite coastlines, towns and landmarks.
New destinations added regularly
Posters from the places you love
Over 320 curated artists
Browse all artists
Curated by Artists
Museum Quality Prints
Crafted to Last
Designed for Interiors
Style It Your Way
Popular prints available framed or on canvas
Timeless Art For Beautifully Designed Homes
Why Choose Us ?
What customers say
Over 5000
Happy Art Lovers
From Our Journal
Agnes Martin Stopped Painting for Seven Years and Drove to Taos
In summer 1967, Agnes Martin walked out of her New York studio at the bottom of Manhattan, gave away most of her materials, sold or destroyed the canvases she had not been able to sell, bought a pickup truck and a small camping trailer, and drove west. She was fifty-five years old. She did not paint again for seven years. She had been working in New York since 1957 and had been part of the loose group of artists living at Coenties Slip, a small block of derelict buildings near the South Street Seaport. Her neighbours had included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Lenore Tawney. By 1965 her paintings were being shown at the Robert Elkon Gallery and acquired by major collectors. She had a New York reputation. She was leaving it deliberately. Saskatchewan Martin was born in 1912 in Maklin, a small farming town in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Her father died when she was two. Her mother, a strict Presbyterian, raised her and her three brothers on a small farm during the prairie depression of the 1920s and 1930s. The childhood was poor, isolated, and unhappy. Martin would later describe her mother's emotional coldness as one of the formative facts of her life. She left home as soon as she could. She trained as a teacher in Vancouver in the early 1930s, taught in rural Canadian schools, and moved to the United States in 1932 to take care of a pregnant sister. She became an American citizen in 1950. She studied painting at Columbia Teachers College in New York from 1941 to 1942 and again from 1951 to 1952, after which she moved to New Mexico for the first time and taught painting at the University of New Mexico. New York The first significant period in her painting life began in 1957, when Betty Parsons, the New York dealer, visited her in New Mexico and invited her to come to New York. Parsons, who had been Pollock's and Rothko's first dealer in the 1940s, recognised something in Martin's early gridded work and offered her a New York show. Martin moved to New York that year. She took the small loft at Coenties Slip and began producing the work that would make her reputation: large square canvases (most often 1.83 metres on a side) covered with delicately ruled grids of horizontal and vertical lines, drawn in pencil over a pale ground of oil or acrylic wash. The grids were calculated but slightly imperfect. The hand of the maker was always visible in the slight wavering of the lines and the small variations in pressure. The paintings were difficult to photograph and almost impossible to reproduce. They had to be seen in person. At close range they revealed the labour of the pencil work; at a distance of a few metres they began to fill the visual field with a kind of even, vibrating light. The paintings were neither minimalist (the hand was too visible) nor abstract expressionist (the gesture was too restrained). They occupied a position of their own. The Departure The departure from New York in 1967 was triggered by several events in close succession. Ad Reinhardt, the painter Martin most admired among her contemporaries, died in August 1967. The Coenties Slip buildings, where she had lived for ten years, were being demolished for new construction. Martin had also suffered (and would continue to suffer) from auditory hallucinations and what she described as catatonic episodes, which had brought her to McLean Hospital outside Boston for several extended stays in the early 1960s. Her doctors had diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. The combination of personal grief, the loss of the studio neighbourhood, and the strain of New York life made her decide to leave. She had been considering it for some time. The summer of 1967 was when she acted. The Seven Years For the next seven years, Martin lived in various places in New Mexico. She camped in the truck for the first year, then bought a small piece of land near the Cuba area in 1968 and built an adobe house and studio with her own hands. She did not paint. She wrote: small notebooks of meditations and prose poems, several of which would later be published. She read Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts. She listened to classical music. She lived almost entirely alone. The seven-year break has been the subject of much speculation. Martin herself, asked about it later in life, was usually opaque. She said the break had been about "wanting to think." She gave no other detailed explanation. The break should probably be understood as a deliberate strategic withdrawal: she had been working at a certain level in New York and wanted to come back to painting only when she had something different to say. A second installation view of works by Agnes Martin, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Return Martin began painting again in 1974, in her adobe studio outside Cuba. She was sixty-two. The new work was related to the pre-1967 grids but was different in important ways: the colour was no longer just a pale ground but had become the primary visual event of the paintings; the grids were less prominent, sometimes replaced by horizontal bands of pale wash; the formats had widened slightly. The first new paintings were shown at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1975. The reception was strong but cautious; many critics needed to be reminded who Martin was, after the seven-year absence. By the late 1970s, her reputation had been re-established. Taos In 1992, after eighteen years in the Cuba house, Martin moved to Taos, the small town in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. She was eighty. She bought a small modern studio building near the centre of town and an adjacent house. She painted there nearly every day until her death. The Taos years produced her most concentrated late work. The paintings were now slightly smaller (often 1.5 metres square), with horizontal bands of pale colour washed across the canvas: pinks, blues, yellows, and greys. The grids were sometimes invisible, the colour bands carrying the painting on their own. Each painting was titled with a single word: Friendship, Innocent Love, Untroubled Mind, Lovely Life. The titles read as instructions to the viewer about what the painting was offering. Martin had become explicit, in her late writing and her late conversations, about her view that the paintings were vehicles for specific emotional states. "The paintings are not landscapes," she said in a 1989 interview. "They are about what life feels like when it is at its best." The Influence By the 1990s, Martin had become a foundational figure for a younger generation of painters who were working in pared-down, attentive, contemplative modes. Painters as different as Sean Scully, Susan Rothenberg, Brice Marden, and Vija Celmins all named her as an important precedent. The Tate Modern's 2015 retrospective in London, which travelled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, made her standing as one of the central American painters of the second half of the twentieth century explicit. The reception was not universal. Some critics found the late work too repetitive. Others found the late writing's invocation of "joy" and "innocent love" too earnest. The work was also accused of being apolitical in a period when much of the most-discussed American art was explicitly political. The defence of the work has usually rested on the structure rather than the content. Martin had developed, over forty years of painting after 1957, a way of using a small set of formal devices (grid, band, pale colour, soft graphite) to produce paintings that operated on the viewer at a specific physiological frequency. The paintings work, when they work, because of how the eye reads them at close range. The End Martin died on 16 December 2004, aged ninety-two, in Taos. She had continued to paint until shortly before her death. The last canvases (now mostly in private collections) are smaller than the standard 1.5-metre square, and the bands of colour are even more reduced. The Harwood Museum in Taos has a permanent room of seven late Agnes Martin paintings. The Dia Beacon, in upstate New York, has a permanent installation of the major mid-period paintings. The Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art each hold significant individual works. The Agnes Martin Foundation, established in her will, manages her archive and the disposition of her remaining works. What the Departure Was For The seven-year break from painting between 1967 and 1974 has come to look, in retrospect, like the most important decision of Martin's career. She had been a successful New York painter; she could have continued and done well. By leaving, she let her work reset. By returning at sixty-two, she gave herself another thirty years of working at the highest level she ever reached. Martin painted for forty-seven years total. Almost all the work that matters most was made after she was sixty. The pre-1967 grids are foundational, but the post-1974 paintings (the Cuba paintings, the Taos paintings, the late horizontal bands) are what most viewers now think of when they think of an Agnes Martin painting. She had decided, in 1967, that what she had to say required her to stop talking first. The decision was unusual. It produced, in the end, the strongest second act in twentieth-century American painting.
Lempicka Painted the Aristocracy She Married Into, Then Outran Them All
Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1898 (the exact year is disputed; Lempicka herself gave several different dates across her life). Her family was wealthy bourgeois Polish-Jewish, with roots in both Warsaw and St Petersburg. She married a Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki, in St Petersburg in 1916. The Bolshevik Revolution caught them there in October 1917. Tadeusz was arrested by the Cheka in early 1918. Tamara secured his release by sleeping with a Swedish consul who had connections to the Bolshevik authorities. The couple escaped to Copenhagen, then to London, then to Paris by spring 1918. They were among the early waves of White Russian émigrés who would reshape Paris society in the 1920s. Paris By 1920 the Lempickis were broke. Tamara had brought no money from Russia, and Tadeusz could not find legal work in Paris. She had no professional training. She decided to support the family by painting. She enrolled briefly at the Académie Ranson and studied with Maurice Denis, then transferred to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1922 and studied with André Lhote. Lhote, who was teaching a kind of decorative Cubism, taught her the structural method that would underlie all her mature work: bodies built from geometric forms, sharply outlined, modelled with strong directional light. She would credit Lhote, throughout her life, as the only teacher who had taught her anything she could use. By 1923 she was exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne. Her first major sale (a portrait of Ira Perrot, a society neighbour) was in 1924. By 1925 she was painting the people who could afford to commission her: Polish émigré aristocrats, French industrialists, occasional foreign nobles passing through Paris. Her prices rose quickly through the late 1920s. She was one of the highest-paid female portraitists of the decade. The Style The Lempicka manner combined several sources that should not have fit together. From Lhote: the structural Cubism, the simplification of bodies into faceted geometric forms. From Italian Mannerism (which she had studied during a year-long visit to Italy in 1926): the elongated necks, the long fingers, the slightly artificial proportions, the heavy modelling of single figures against backgrounds reduced to architecture or sky. From Art Deco design (which was reaching its peak in Paris during her formative years): the highly polished surfaces, the bold colour blocking, the sense that the painted figure was a designed object. The combination was hers alone. Other artists had used pieces of it (Lhote himself was working a Cubist idiom; Italian Novecento painters were quoting Mannerism), but no one else produced the specific Lempicka effect: a portrait that looked like a piece of Art Deco metalwork, with the sitter cast in some unbreakable polished material. The Bugatti The 1929 self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti is the painting that defined her public image. It shows her at the wheel of a green sports car, wearing a leather helmet and grey gloves, the background a vertical strip of grey sky and skyscrapers. She did not actually own a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault. The picture was commissioned by Die Dame, a German fashion magazine, for a cover image. The Bugatti was an invention to suit the magazine. The painting became Lempicka's icon. It captures, in a single image, what she sold to her clients: a woman in control of speed, of modernity, of self-presentation, painted in the same hard-edged style that defined the architecture of the period. The cover was published in July 1929, three months before the Wall Street crash. The Marriage The Lempicki marriage did not survive Paris success. Tadeusz had never recovered psychologically from the Russian imprisonment and the loss of his Polish legal career. He drank heavily. Tamara had affairs throughout the 1920s, including with the German-Austrian Baron Raoul Kuffner, who was one of her major patrons. The couple divorced in 1928. Tamara took their daughter Kizette and continued painting. Tadeusz returned to Poland and died there in 1939, shortly before the German invasion. Tamara married Baron Kuffner in 1934 and became Baroness Kuffner. The marriage was financially comfortable and largely affectionate; Kuffner died in 1962 and Tamara never remarried. The 1930s The Depression hit her commercial practice hard. The wealthy clients who had been commissioning portraits in 1929 had less money in 1932. Lempicka adjusted by lowering her prices, taking smaller commissions, and (for the first time) painting non-commissioned subjects: female nudes, still lifes, religious scenes. By the late 1930s, she had moved to a more sober palette, less polished surfaces, and more conventional compositions. The change has been read as a response to the rise of Socialist Realism in Europe, but it was probably just a market adjustment. The hard-edged Art Deco manner had gone out of fashion. The portrait clients who remained wanted softer, more flattering work. The Lempickis left Paris in 1939, as Europe slid toward war. The Baron's properties in Hungary had been seized by the Hungarian government in 1939, and the family had to abandon them. They sailed to New York in early 1940 and then to Hollywood, where they bought a small house. Lempicka tried to establish a portrait practice in Los Angeles. The American market for European Art Deco portraiture was small and provincial. The practice did not really work. The Long Decline Lempicka spent the next two decades attempting to relaunch her career, with limited success. She had exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and (occasionally) Paris through the 1940s and 1950s, but the reception was tepid. The Art Deco style she had defined twenty years earlier had become deeply unfashionable. The art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and Lempicka's polished figurative work was treated as a relic. She continued painting. The work from the 1950s and 1960s is mostly small still lifes, portraits of friends, and occasional religious subjects (she had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1934). The technique was still excellent. The subjects were diminished. She was painting what she could find to paint rather than what she had once chosen. Cuernavaca In 1974, Tamara left Houston (where she had been living with Kizette and Kizette's husband) and moved to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She had been there several times on holiday and decided she preferred the climate. She bought a house called Tres Bambúes and lived there until her death. The last years were quiet. She painted little. She was visited by Kizette and by a few friends. She continued to receive small commissions from local Mexican families. Her international reputation was at its lowest point since the 1920s. She died on 18 March 1980, aged eighty-one or eighty-two. Her ashes were scattered over the crater of the Popocatépetl volcano, according to her wishes. The Recovery The reappraisal began in the late 1970s, even before her death. The Centre Pompidou's 1972 exhibition Les Années 25 (a celebration of the 1925 Paris Exposition that had given Art Deco its name) had included several Lempicka portraits and reintroduced her to French audiences. The 1980 Lucie Smith retrospective in Paris, shortly after her death, made her standing as the central Art Deco portraitist of the 1920s explicit. By the 1990s, her prices were rising sharply at auction. The Green Bugatti self-portrait sold at Sotheby's in 2009 for $6.1 million. The 1929 portrait of Marjorie Ferry sold for $20.5 million in 2020. Madonna had become an early major Lempicka collector in the 1980s. Other celebrities (Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand) followed. The painter who had been famous in 1929, forgotten in 1959, and dead in obscurity in 1980 became, by 2010, the most commercially successful female Art Deco artist on the market. The aristocracy she had painted in the 1920s had been displaced by the global financial elite. The new clients still wanted what her old clients had wanted: a portrait that looked like a piece of polished, unbreakable design.
Duchamp Submitted a Urinal to the 1917 Independents and the Jury Hid It
In April 1917, the Society of Independent Artists held its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. The Society had been founded the previous December on the principle that there would be no jury and no prizes. Anyone who paid the membership fee of six dollars could submit two works, and the Society pledged to exhibit every submission. On 9 April, a wooden crate arrived at the exhibition hall. Inside was a porcelain urinal of the kind manufactured by the J. L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue. It had been turned on its back, signed in black paint with the name "R. Mutt" and the date 1917, and labelled as the entry "Fountain" by R. Mutt of Philadelphia. The six-dollar submission fee had been paid. The Society's board met in private. The board removed the urinal from the floor, never displayed it, and never returned it. The exhibition ran for several weeks. Many of the artists who had submitted lesser-known work to the Society were now exhibited; the Fountain was not. R. Mutt did not collect his urinal. Who Was R. Mutt R. Mutt was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a French painter who had moved to New York in 1915 to escape the war. He had already become known for the painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, which had caused a scandal at the 1913 New York Armory Show. By 1917, he was one of the founding members of the Society of Independent Artists and on its board of directors. The Fountain submission was a test. Duchamp wanted to know whether the Society would actually honour its pledge to exhibit every submission, or whether the no-jury principle was a pose. He used the pseudonym R. Mutt (a play on the Mott Iron Works manufacturer's name and on the contemporary Mutt and Jeff cartoon strip) so that the board would not know it was him. He paid the six dollars from his own pocket. He waited to see what would happen. The board (which did not know R. Mutt was Duchamp) voted to suppress the entry by a narrow margin. The arguments were that the urinal was vulgar, that it was plagiarism (since Duchamp had not made it), and that it was simply not art. The vote was not unanimous; several board members (notably Walter Arensberg, a key Duchamp patron) voted to keep it. Duchamp resigned from the board immediately. He had not announced himself as the artist. He resigned on the grounds that the Society had failed its founding principle. Within days, the news that Fountain had been suppressed was circulating in New York art circles. The Photograph The original urinal disappeared shortly after the suppression. It was almost certainly thrown away. What survives is a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery, sometime after the suppression. Duchamp had taken the urinal to Stieglitz, set it up against a painted backdrop (a painting by Marsden Hartley was used as the background), and asked Stieglitz to photograph it. The photograph was published in a small art journal called The Blind Man in May 1917. The Blind Man article that accompanied the photograph included an editorial defending Fountain. The argument was simple: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object." The editorial was probably written by Duchamp himself, with the help of Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché. It is the first explicit theoretical defence of the readymade as a category in art. The argument compresses what Duchamp had been working on for several years: that the act of selection, in art, was equivalent to the act of making. Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 21 June 1917, New York City. Duchamp photographed himself five times in the same composition, using a mirrored arrangement that allowed him to appear in profile, three-quarter, and full-face simultaneously. The Readymades Duchamp had begun making what he called "readymades" in 1913. The first was a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. He had also made (and destroyed) a number of others before Fountain: a bottle rack, a snow shovel inscribed In Advance of the Broken Arm. The principle was always the same. He selected an ordinary manufactured object. He named it and signed it. He declared it to be art. The argument behind the readymades had several layers. The most obvious was that the artist's act was the act of selection, not the act of making. The deeper layer was about the question of what constitutes an art object at all. If a urinal could be art when selected and signed, then the conditions that made other things art (the painter's labour, the marble carving, the aesthetic judgment) could be analysed and questioned. The Fountain suppression made these arguments visible in public for the first time. Before 1917, the readymades had been private studio works. After 1917, they were the centrepiece of an ongoing argument about the nature of art that has not yet been settled. What Happened to the Urinal The original Fountain disappeared, almost certainly thrown out by the Society staff after the exhibition closed. Duchamp commissioned several replicas over the next fifty years. The first replica, made in 1950 for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 1964 edition of eight replicas, made under Duchamp's supervision by the Galerie Schwarz in Milan, is now distributed across major museums: the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Indiana University Art Museum, and several private collections. The 1964 replicas are based on the Stieglitz photograph rather than the original urinal, since the original had been lost. The replicas are slightly larger than the original would have been and use a different model of porcelain urinal. They are nonetheless "the Fountain" in the institutional sense: Duchamp authorised them, the museums treat them as the work, the historical record refers to them as Fountain. What the Suppression Established The Society's suppression of Fountain was a public failure of the no-jury principle. The Society went on for several years (its annual exhibitions continued through the 1920s), but it never again claimed to be an open society. The pretence had been tested and broken. The argument that the suppression made possible was larger. Duchamp's Fountain, and the readymade principle behind it, became the founding move of conceptual art. The line that runs from Fountain through Dada, through Pop Art, through Conceptualism, through institutional critique, and into much of the contemporary art of the past sixty years, starts in April 1917. The 2004 survey of British art professionals, organised by Turner Prize patrons, voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The vote was about a urinal that was never actually exhibited and was thrown out within weeks. Duchamp Afterwards Duchamp made no paintings after 1923 and (apparently) very little art of any kind after the late 1920s. He had publicly declared himself bored with painting. He spent the next forty years playing chess at competitive level, writing chess columns for newspapers, and making occasional small works in private. He maintained that he had retired from art. The retirement was a pose. From 1946 to 1966, Duchamp secretly worked on a single large installation, Étant donnés, a 3-D tableau viewed through a peephole in a wooden door, showing a nude female figure in a landscape. He worked on it in a studio in New York that nobody knew about. He left it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at his death in 1968. The museum installed it according to his instructions, and it has been on display since. The Étant donnés revealed that the most influential conceptualist of the twentieth century had spent his official retirement years secretly making a single large object. The retirement had been a strategy. The argument Duchamp had begun in 1917 (about the conditions under which a thing becomes art) was being conducted, in his own studio, for another fifty years.