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| Wilhelmina Barns-Graham June Painting, Ultramarine and Yellow 1996 acrylic on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Colin Smith Wardrobe 16 1995-97 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Viktor Pivovarov This is Radio Moscow . . . 1992-96 enamel on canvas on fibreboard Tate Gallery |
"The painting is from Pivovarov's series of thirty-five paintings, Apartment 22, and its features are characteristic of the series as a whole. The series was produced between 1992 and 1996 in Prague, the city to which the artist emigrated in 1982. The title Apartment 22 is a reference to the Moscow communal apartment where Pivovarov lived with his mother as a child. . . . While elements of the stories told in Apartment 22 are based on Pivovarov's personal recollections of daily life in the post-war Soviet Union, the characters, objects and texts in the paintings are not directly autobiographical. Instead they are based on extracts from a fictional diary written by the artist. The diary recounts the experiences of his invented character Grigory Sergeevich Tatuzov, an impoverished musician living with his partner Mariya in one of the rooms of Apartment 22. The glass on the table in This is Radio Moscow . . . is one of several objects depicted in the series which are specifically mentioned by Grigory in his fictional diary. The diary takes the form of notebooks which survive as physical objects. The quotidian theme of the series is complemented by Pivovarov's use of domestic materials such as enamel paint. . . . Pivovarov was one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, the underground art movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. . . . Although created in the 1990s, Apartment 22 epitomises the ethos of Moscow Conceptualism. Toward the end of the 1980s after a period in the late 1970s and 1980s in which he focused more on geometric abstraction and surrealism, Pivovarov returned to producing work more closely linked to his earlier practice. The focus upon the private lives of fictional Russian citizens forced to undergo communal living . . . exemplifies Pivovarov's belief that 'the stronger the pressure from the outside, the greater the intensity of inner life."
– from notes by Julia Tatiana Bailey and Antonio Geusa at Tate Gallery
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| Joseph Beuys Electric Sphinx 1977 drawing Tate Gallery |
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| Colin Self Nude 1970-71 etching Tate Gallery |
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| Robert Rauschenberg Retroactive I 1964 oil paint and silkscreen ink on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Pablo Picasso The Artist 1963 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| John Nash Mill Building, Boxted 1962 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Claude Rogers Cornfields at Somerton 1961 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Helen Frankenthaler Sea Picture with Black 1959 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Reginald Marsh Three Male Figure-studies before 1954 drawing Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Charles Sheeler New England Irrelevancies 1953 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"In 1946 Charles Sheeler spent six weeks as artist in residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Two years later he visited the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire for two weeks, again as artist in residence. Although Sheeler, who was in his sixties, was respected and nationally recognized, he was then garnering less attention from galleries and art press than the ascendant Abstract Expressionists. These brief sojourns reinvigorated him. During his visits, Sheeler photographed a decrepit woolen mill building in Ballardvale, on the outskirts of Andover, and the abandoned textile mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester. These decayed buildings inspired new ideas, and between 1946 and 1953 Sheeler produced over twenty images in oil, tempera, ink wash, and Conté crayon based upon either Ballardvale or the Amoskeag mills. These culminated in New England Irrelevancies, which combines forms from both sites. The title of the painting presumably alludes to the once-impressive buildings and prosperous industries that had dominated Andover and Manchester but were now obsolete. The sense of the buildings' irrelevance may have struck Sheeler personally, too: by the time he completed this painting he was seventy years old and remote from the artistic mainstream. However, New England Irrelevancies is far from grim or moribund. Painted in the opalescent hues that give so many of Sheeler's industrial subjects an astonishing optimism, the picture shows these dilapidated nineteenth-century mill buildings as though they were vibrant contemporary skyscrapers."
– from curator's notes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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| Luigi Bompard Gli Studi a Carnevali before 1953 lithograph Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Guy Bourdin Untitled 1952 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
"French photographer Guy Bourdin is best known for his experimental colour fashion photography produced while working for French Vogue between 1955 and 1977. This photograph belongs to an earlier period of experimentation, before he began to use colour and work in fashion. . . . This and other early Bourdin works in Tate's collection are typical of Subjektive Fotografie, a tendency in the medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Led by the German photographer and teacher Otto Steinert . . . the movement advocated artistic self-expression – in the form of the artist's creative approach to composition, processing and developing – above factual representation."
– from curator's notes at Tate Gallery