Masterworks

This picture, from 1793, shows a scene from Act 4 of Shakespeare's comedy 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Titania, the Fairy Queen, under Oberon's spell, has fallen in love with the first creature she has set eyes upon. The object of her passion is Bottom, a simple weaver, innocently trapped in elaborate love games in the woods...

Berlin 1913, a busy street in a big city, having put on their lipstick and high heels, the city's tarts are out window-shopping. The scene has been splashed onto the canvas with quick, nervous brushstrokes. The spectator has been transformed into a voyeur. Between 1913 and 1915 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted a series of such street scenes. This one was the first...

During the 24 hour day of the Northern summer, a midnight sun bathes the world in a curious light. It transforms trees and bushes into mysterious apparitions. Colours seem especially luminous. The people of the North cannot sleep. Young girls go out into the perpetual twilight of the 'white nights,' to walk and think.

There are many examples in the history of art of one artist painting another. But before Andy Warhol no one had done it 28 times in one picture - as Warhol does here, in a portrait of his fellow-American Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol called his portrait 'The Texan,' after the famous 'cowboy state' in which Rauschenberg was born...

In 1968 a photo taken in Vietnam by Edward T. Adams, showing the brutal assassination of a defenceless Vietcong soldier, aroused an outcry in the international press. Adam's photograph brought home to millions around the world the true horror of the Vietnam Conflict. The artist Wolf Vostell took this famous war-photograph and combined it with an image of a dancing beauty queen.