The most significant acquisition in this area is Georges Braque's The Billiard Table 1945. This important painting exemplifies Braque's complex and sophisticated analysis of his familiar world, and its purchase fulfils a long-held ambition to strengthen his representation. It was made possible through the fund associated with the Gustav and Elly Kahnweiler Bequest (the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool during 2004), with additional generous support from the Art Fund, Tate Members and the Dr V.J. Daniel Bequest.

In 2002, we acquired Boris Taslitzky's searing Study for The Death of Danielle Casanova to add to other, recently secured, Socialist Realist paintings. The collection of Surrealism was also augmented. Now in her nineties, Dorothea Tanning is a vital living link to the Surrealist movement and her painting Some Roses and Their Phantoms, presented by Tate Collectors Forum, embodies that position. Two disturbing soft sculptures by Tanning, purchased at the same time, chime with a group of six objects by Man Ray. His presence in the Collection has been transformed by this addition to the one already there. Two were generously presented by Lucien Treillard, the artist's one-time assistant, two were presented by Tate Collectors Forum, and two were purchased. Artists have long been generous in releasing significant works for the Tate Collection, and this is maintained by Shozo Shimamoto's gift of two important Holes pieces made in the early 1950s. Their arrival initiates our representation of Japanese Gutaï work, which has strong connections with European and American gestural abstraction. Beyond that, this acquisition signals a more widely international view of post-war art.

Two outstanding works in this area have been allocated from the estate of John and Myfanwy Piper through the Government scheme of acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax. These are a dramatic Standing Mobile by Alexander Calder and an early Abstract Composition by Jean Hélion. Appropriately, they date from the vital moment at the end of the 1930s in when Britain played a crucial international role in avant-garde art.