Masterworks

"Roy Lichtenstein's 'Girl with Hair Ribbon' looks out at us as if surprised, even a little hurt. But it is anyone's guess as to what has made her suddenly turn and look over her shoulder. Nothing really matters here outside the gesture and its intended effect: the 'Girl with Hair Ribbon' conveys surprise, but above all she seduces..."

"Shakespeare was a favourite source for 19th century artists: and as a young man with a taste for romantic melancholy, John Everett Millais was - not surprisingly - drawn towards the death of Ophelia, described so beautifully in the 4th Act of Hamlet..."

"In his picture of the bicycle racer, painted in 1914, Jean Metzinger uses a new method to address a problem that interested many painters at the time - the problem of how to deal with movement. The main difficulty faced by painters was how to convey a whole sequence of gestures on a plane surface.''

The artist Edward Hopper painted his picture 'Nighthawks' in New York in 1942. He wrote: 'Nighthawks shows what I imagine when I think of a street at night. Probably unconsciously I have painted loneliness in a big city.' Loneliness, solitude, desolation - key themes which appear again and again in Hopper's work, even if the artist himself was keen not to overestimate their importance..."

"News photos taken after a plane crash or an earthquake give us the same sense of confusion as we feel in front of Caspar David Friedrich's picture of a shipwreck in the Arctic, painted in 1823. It is difficult to see exactly what has happened here. We are only left with a sense of helplessness, a sense of awe at the power of forces beyond our control and beyond our understanding..."

"This picture, painted by the Swiss artist Johannes Itten, is called 'The Meeting.' And yet we see nothing of the beings - be they people, children or animals - the title seems to imply. The meeting here takes place between two coloured spirals moving ever closer until they finally curl into each other..."

"Among the many works of art which Napoleon brought from all over Europe to the Louvre in Paris, was a large altarpiece by the early Renaissance painter Andrea Mantenga. Only the original central scene of the predella, which formed the base of the altarpiece, remains in the museum's collection. The subject of this comparatively small wooden panel is the Crucifixion..."

"Early in the 16th century the Venetian painter Titian received a commission from the Duke of Ferrara for five large canvases to decorate his private study. It is not clear how much studying the Duke was proposing to do, but the three pictures Titian actually completed and delivered were guaranteed to distract any man from his work. 'Bacchanal' is one of them..."

"Baselitz allows intimations of brutality and anxiety into his pictures. But seen against the monotony and greyness of modern life, his subjects nonetheless have an attraction stronger than our sense of sadness, shock or revulsion..."

"Many of Rembrandt's most moving human dramas emerge towards us out of the darkness. And many of these are stories from the Bible: in this case one of the most famous of all Christ's parables - his words to the Pharisees describing 'The Return of the Prodigal Son,' from St. Luke's Gospel."