The 1000++ Artworks created around 1950

Time Transfixed (La Durée poignardée, 1938) is an oil on canvas painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. It is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and is usually on display in the museum's new Modern Wing.
The painting was one of many done for surrealist p...

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No. 5, 1948 is a painting by Jackson Pollock, an American painter known for his contributions to the abstract expressionist movement. The painting was done on an 8' × 4' sheet of fiberboard, with thick amounts of brown and yellow paint drizzled on top of it, forming a nest-like appearance. It was or...

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The Seducer is a 1953 painting of Rene Magritte. It was created in Brussels, Belgium on surrealism style to depict Mature Period. The dimension of painting is 38 cm by 46 cm and is based on storyline of marina. The night effect has been prominently featured in this painting by use of dark blue and l...

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A nude courtesan stands brazenly before us, her breasts and soft stomach are bare, her hair wrapped in an elaborate headdress. A tangle of limbs, breasts and buttocks fill the rest of the canvas, which measures 57 by 45 inches. Here are women selling their bodies, many of them faceless, reduced to t...

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The series of paintings, which are known as the blue nudes, were painted between 1952 and 53 using the gouache découpage method. They illustrate how provocative a simple design can be. Matisse used simple cut shapes to construct the images and uses the colour blue because of its obvious ties with nu...

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The painting depicts an office, occupied by an attractive young woman in a short-sleeved blue dress, who is standing at an open file cabinet, and a slightly older man who is perhaps in early middle age. He is dressed in a three-piece suit and is seated behind a desk. The nature of the office is uncl...

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Inside this painting are six separate images, interwoven and laid atop one another.This composition is probably the best example of paranoiac-critical activity in operation in the paintings done by Dal. He is not satisfied with pursuing a double image but succeeds in accumulating and making rise si...

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Delvaux’s work combined classical perfection with an erotic and troubling atmosphere. The sensuousness of Sleeping Venus is set against its oppressive night-time setting. Delvaux later explained that it was painted in Brussels during the German wartime occupation and while the city was being bombed....

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Summertime conveys the feeling of a sweltering day in New York City. The curtain on the window seems set in motion by an interior fan, emphasizing the lack of air. The strong verticals and horizontals of the architecture and sidewalk, based on preparatory drawings of a particular building Hopper l...

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The wilted tree of life with branches cut off represents the material plane not being rooted in the life. This is emphasized by one end of the tree being cut off in the painting. Hitler is represented as a torn photo. There are several peculiarities to note. Only this object has a recognizable face ...

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Like Magritte said: “Anyone crazy about movement or its opposite will not enjoy this picture.” I agree with Magritte because this painting is simultaneously static and generates a lot of movement. It looks static because Magritte seems to be frozen: the way he’s chewing, cutting the meat and poring ...

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Hopper wrote to his patron, Stephen Clark, in September, 1958: 'I'm very pleased that you have acquired my picture, Sunlight in a Cafeteria. I think it's one of my very best pictures.' From his youth, Hopper had been intrigued by people in urban restaurants, sketching one such scene when he was only...

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In Cape Cod Morning Edward Hopper captures the post-war mood of anxiety in this stark, ambiguous painting. John Sloan and Andrew Wyeth are among other realist painters in the collection. Some American modernists found new ways of depicting the spirit of their age. The dynamic rhythms of modern life ...

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Rooms for Tourists, like most of Hopper's scenic paintings, displays the importance of light as a dramatic element. The mood in pictures depends on the special character of light at different times of day, the light also creating a common basis for architectural forms and natural phenomena. Architec...

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Frida painted this self-portrait for her patron, the engineer Eduardo Morillo Safa, after a botched operation in New York. She wrote to him about the painting and about the scars '...which those surgeon sons of bitches landed me with'. In the message 'Tree of Hope, Remain Strong', which is written o...

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This is one of Frida's most shocking and controversial paintings. Frida painted it in the style of an 'ex-voto (retablo)'. The unfortunate victim in this painting is Dorothy Hale, actress and Ziegfeld showgirl. Hale's life suddenly took a turn for the worse when her husband was killed in an automobi...

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Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was painted in 1954 by Salvador Dalí, and depicts the crucified Jesus upon the net of a hypercube. Gala (Dalí's wife), is the figure in the bottom left, who stands looking up to the crucified Jesus. The scene is depicted in front of the bay of Port Lligat. The paintin...

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