"Artaud's late drawings have been a comparatively recent discovery. His poetry and writings on the theatre were better known previously. In the latter respect, his notions of catharsis had a decisive impact on the Body Art of the 1970s. After...
"Broodthaer's Musée d'Arte Moderne assumed various forms. The 'Department of Eagles', which contained the exhibits pictured here, had further permutations in other venues. In a Düsseldorf showing of 1970 the museum's 'nineteenth-century'...
"Gala-Leda rendered 'in accordance with the modern "nothing touches" theory of intra-atomic physica' (Dali)." (Caption); Dali himself was only too happy to admit his debt to Gala. In the early 1930s he had begun to sign his...
"Hesse produced a series of versions of this sculpture during 1967-8. They set up an interesting dialogue with [Donald] Judd's frequent exposure of the interiors of his 'boxes'. They also respond obliquely to an iconographic tradition of...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works
"In the mid-1980s Richter produced abstract paintings as well as realist 'photo-paintings'. […] he appeared here to be recapitulating the ideological options underpinning postwar modernism in so far as his own transplantation from Eastern to...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Civil wars; War; Politics & government; Political issues; Dictators; Nazis; Fascism; Civilization; Bombings; Military tactics; War destruction & pillage; Death; Dismemberment; Body parts; Mental states; Despair;...
"In this monumental work of 1937, Guernica, Picasso combined Analytic and Synthetic Cubist forms with several traditional motifs, juxtaposing them in a new Surrealist way. The combination serves the political message of the painting - namely,...
"Man Ray's most famous photograph, Le Violon d'Ingres, combines Dada wordplay with Surrealist imagery. The nude recalls the odalisques of Ingres, while the title refers to Ingres's hobby - playing the violin (which led to the French phrase...
"One of Dali's finest paintings from the 1940s." (Caption); "My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Body Transformed into Steps, the Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture, on the other hand, was one of the finest, and most...
"Polke's work frequently juxtaposes images wrenched from different periods of history. At the bottom left he makes use of a collage by the early twentieth-century Surrealist Max Ernst, whilst the central image derives from a satirical etching...
"The atom bomb was good news for Dali's commercial art." (Caption); "The New York Times reviewer of the Sentimental Colloquy had said correctly that Dali's 'Surrealist' paintings were now executed according to a mere formula. That...
"The First Days of Spring inaugurated a series of works in which, determined to be more Surrealist than the Surrealists themselves, Dali elaborated a symbolic language for delineating, with microscopic precision, his erotic obsessions. It...
Black and white photo-collage; "This collage makes use of photographs of a project carried out by Matta Clark in Englewood, New Jersey, which involved him splitting apart a house that was due for demolition. Having divided the house in half by...
Pencil drawing; "This drawing, which at nearly three feet in height is very large for Giacometti, is one of an enormous number that he produced throughout his life. His sculptures and paintings of the figure, similarly attenuated, are far...
