Masterworks

"'Sad Young Man on a Train' the title tells us. But where is the man in this jumble of lines? This picture was painted in 1911 by Marcel Duchamp, an elegant, assured and awfully clever young man. If this really is a figure, then it is one that has been taken apart and reassembled, first in the painter's mind and then on his canvas ..."

"Picabia's work embraces a multitude of styles and media, a characteristic that seems reflected in a joke he is said to have made: 'Heads are round so that thought can often change direction.' When this picture was produced, Picabia was especially fascinated by machines. It resembles more a technical diagram rather than a painting..."

This picture is painted on wood and was bought by Peggy Guggenheim in 1940 from Theo van Doesburg. Of course, there are no traces of a car in Balla's painting 'Abstract Speed plus Noise.' Instead, we see a turbulent criss-cross of lines sweeping to the very edges of the painting and filling the whole picture with movement.

Perhaps the title of the painting is misleading: It encourages us to look for concrete objects of a certain kind - a barricade, a wall, perhaps a barbed wire fence. The feeling that dominates here is one of antagonism. No reconciliation seems possible between the deep black and brilliant white or between the equally determined vertical and horizontal lines and contrary diagonals...