Masterworks

''It seems as though Malevich is telling us a story, or perhaps taking us on a journey - an Englishman's journey through Moscow, and what the artist imagines such an Englishman might notice about the city in the days when the Russian Revolution is already threatening..."

A grim and gloomy painting with the title 'Interior' - an interior in which there is nothing, except a pale fire burning. Kiefer was born in Germany in a significant year 1945, end of World War Two. Kiefer's work alludes - darkly - to events in that war, to the ideologies and fantasies which spawned it, and most obviously to the monuments and famous places associated with Nazi regime.

"Yves Klein was a cult-figure of the Paris Left Bank around 1960 until his death at only 32. He helped found a movement known as 'new realism.' A paradox - art as anti-art - let us explore. It has a title, 'Blue Harmony' which does not help much. We know the dimensions - six feet by five, and the materials - sponges on stretched canvas, all soaked in blue..."

"'In the Wing Beat of the Swans' - an evocative title. But first the size: it is almost seven feet high, nearly ten feet across. We have to imagine it to be much bigger then we are. The artist is Asger Jorn, born in Denmark in 1914, lived in Amsterdam for some time, though mainly in Paris. He painted this picture in 1963..."

"Abstract painting is sometimes - though not always - a distilling of experiences of the world around us; though to seek recognisable images of that familiar world may prove a futile task. Such is the case with this fugitive veil of a picture by the Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning. Even looking at it for less than a minute one is aware of a windblown freshness..."