Masterworks

At first it is hard to see what connection the picture has with the setting its title evokes. We mainly notice colours, textures and shapes. Gradually we can make out the shape of a coffee mill, a coffee pot, a bottle, a bowl and a French newspaper. The imitation wood grain suggests a table, and the papery, sharply folded white area a table cloth...

In this poetic painting of 1929 Yves Tanguy presents us with a magical submarine world and its depth. In the centre hangs a pivotal being, a yellow-white shape, half bird, half shell, each part distinct, yet melting into the other, suggesting a possible metamorphosis...

Jean Dubuffet called this painting 'Campange heureuse' - 'Happy Countryside' or 'Happy Landscape.' At first glance it looks more like a map than a picture: the land is divided by vertical and horizontal lines into patches of many different colours. It looks like a very well ordered and organised piece of land...

Alberto Giacometti painted the French writer Jean Genet in 1955. We can call the picture a portrait in the usual sense in as far as the face of the sitter is recognisable. But, as we might have guessed, Giacometti is interested less in surface appearance than in emotions and anxieties. Like a good many of Giacometti's figures, Genet looks bewildered and anxious...

Sonia Delaunay painted this picture at the age of 29 in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. She painted it in Paris, and it is still there, hanging with other modern works in the galleries of the Beaubourg. It is a large picture, enlivened with clear, bold colours and dominated by circular forms made up of rings and blocks...