Daniel Sturgis: With the Albers & Moholy-Nagy show you see abstraction at a moment of kind of utopian excellence.

Idris Khan: What Nagy did was open the idea of expressionistic photography.

Michael Craig-Martin: All of my thinking about colour comes from Albers.

Daniel Sturgis: These paintings bring home to you that colour is a cultured thing, as well as something to do purely with perception.

Michael Craig-Martin: Albers started at the Bauhaus. He was one of its founders, and he understood exactly the aims. He was completely identified with the aims of the Bauhaus, at the heart of European modernism. And he was very concerned about the finding of a way of visually approaching the world in terms of art, architecture and design.

Daniel Sturgis: The world, which was changing, and changing to do with industrialisation, changing to do with the huge scientific developments which had happened in the preceding years.

Michael Craig-Martin: When the Bauhaus had to close he eventually came to America, where he was teaching at Black Mountain College. And the people he taught at Black Mountain are just extraordinary Johns and Rauschenberg. Cage was there, Merce Cunningham was there, Twombly. An amazing array of people that affected, created, really, the next generation of American art. When he was 60 years old he was made a professor at Yale. It was also the year that he started to make the Homage to the Square paintings, which are the ones that he is known for. So obviously he's a great late bloomer. He gives hope to everybody who starts their prime work late in their career.

Daniel Sturgis: Within the Homage series what's interesting is that on the back of each of those paintings Albers would actually write the particular colours that he used within each painting. And you might have a particular image where three yellows were used, which were all exactly the same yellow, the same named yellow, but were made by three different paint manufacturers. And then you might also have the same colour, which was different, which is sort of similar, but by being placed together, you see the real difference. You see how colour, for Albers, was such a very, very unstable thing, that he makes colour something which is really very, very fluid, something which you can't pin down. And I think that's one of the great charms, really, of these paintings.

Michael Craig-Martin: It was a very interesting idea about colour that Albers had, in its way very revolutionary. Because unlike most colour theorists, Albers didn't consider that it was a theory. He considered that theories were too intellectual, that reading about colour, studying colour, in some kind of distanced way, really taught you nothing about how to use colour. And as an artist, what he was interested in was the idea of using colour. So you had to understand what was happening in colour in different contexts.

Daniel Sturgis: That's another of the things Albers showed, about how colour changed to do with what it was next to

Michael Craig-Martin: There was no such thing as cadmium red. There were different cadmiums. Cadmium red was different in one... A lot of cadmium red was different in a small amount. It was different if you had a green background or a blue background. And it was understanding that manipulation of colour that interested him. My understanding of the proper way in which one should look at an Albers painting, these are very quiet works and they take time to look at. He expects you to stand in front of the painting and to look at it, and let the colour act on you.

Daniel Sturgis: And it takes a long time for you to decipher what hits the eye.

Michael Craig-Martin: You have to give it time. Otherwise they look like design exercises, which was something he would have hated, the idea that they were simply these rather attractive, bland squares. He wanted you to look at the colours and see what happened in their interrelationships. That was his idea of when a colour...of when a painting was working properly, was when those relationships produced an experience that was grander than the actual, just nominal thing of what the colours were.

Daniel Sturgis: Within Moholy-Nagy's work, you see a different use of technology than you do in Albers'. He embraced technology, tried to use technology within the art-making process. He thought that that was a really important thing to do, to actually use the new industrial techniques that were being developed, to actually make the works of art. That somehow one should not be afraid of that, one shouldn't be harking back to old traditions.

Alice Rawsthorn: From the early 1920s onwards, Moholy experimented with the photogram, which is essentially taking a photograph without using a camera. This embraced many aspects of his subsequent work. It advanced his experiments with light and shadow. It also introduced an element of the impromptu, the uncontrollable, to his work. The photograms, to Moholy, were an intellectual and critical experiment. But they're also, formally, very, very beautiful works of art. He had a fantastic eye for proportion, a wonderful sense of shape, and both these qualities are very evident in the photograms.

Idris Khan: He wanted to try and look at certain subjects from different viewpoints, whether he would shoot a birds-eye view of something, close to someone's face, and get into various different angles. He was really obsessed with wanting to change people's viewpoint of photography.

Alice Rawsthorn: Moholy absolutely refused to recognise the traditional beaux arts hierarchy of different areas of the visual arts. He refused to accept that one discipline was more or less important than another, or that an individual artist or designer should restrict themselves to individual disciplines. Instead, he preferred to think of himself as a practitioner and as a teacher, moving, apparently effortlessly, from field to field. This has remained a huge influence on contemporary art and design.where it's now become de rigueur for practitioners to experiment with different fields. He also believed that both art and design should be related to, in a very natural, or intuitive, as he called it, way, by their users and consumers. This is something that Jonathan Ive and the Apple design team have picked up on in their notion of intuitive design, in its application to the interface of Apple's products, like the iMac and the iPod. To them, it's absolutely essential that to the user it seems natural, almost intuitive, to be able to use that technology in an intelligent and imaginative way. That's something, that in theoretical terms, traces itself all the way back to Moholy's writings in the early 20th century.

Idris Khan: One of the paintings in the show that really influences me is an image called G 11. What Moholy-Nagy tried to do with this is to remove the material base plane. And what this does is, it takes away the depth of the painting, so therefore we can't measure its time. In a way, it extends the time of the painting. So what he does is, he removes the base plane, and the paint almost looks like it's floating in front of the background. He came at about the time where there was a real struggle within photography, where he was trying to move away from the idea of the pictorialists, where they wanted to try and recreate an image that looked like an oil painting. He wanted to simplify things and bring them back to just light.

Alice Rawsthorn: Moholy was absolutely obsessed by light, and by using his work to explore the relationship between light, shadow, the moving image and other visual images. It's because of this work that he has been so influential over contemporary graphic and multimedia designers and artists. The Light-Space Modulator was the quintessence of this. It was a very bizarre machine, initially made in wood, and then in metal and glass, assembled of moving components, in which lights flashed on and off, so that a series of very intricate shadows was created and thrown, with the light being diffused and treated in different depths and qualities, to create different effects. He felt that it was the impact of the work that was of paramount importance, not the manner of its creation. In other words, its effect on the audience. To us, this seems an absolutely natural, modern notion, but it was radical for the time.

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