In A Symposium Trevelyan combined painting and carving and attached parts to the wooden panel. He later recalled: "I had invented a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures carrying here and there a few waif-like inhabitants."

The central round shape in this painting comes from a photograph of a Sudanese corn-bin, which Ernst has transformed into a sinister mechanical monster. Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities

This fragile construction suggests the mysteries of the unconscious, combining space and time, eroticism and death

By adding a row of nails, Man Ray transformed a household flat-iron into a new and potentially threatening object. The nails and burning metal suggest a violent eroticism at odds with the work's title, the French word for 'gift'.

Ball Joint makes the element of sexual fantasy explicit by reducing her to two sets of hips.

This is the second phase of Picabia's original work. He ripped the original collaged elements off and added combs for the hair, and painted in the head and hands of a woman

This is one of a series of paintings by Dubuffet in which women¿s bodies are flattened and exposed, subverting accepted ideals of female beauty.

Rouault was a deeply religious artist whose paintings frequently depicted those at the fringes of society, particularly prostitutes and circus performers. He made several paintings of judges which express his skepticism about systems of human justice.

Nicola Tyson describes her work as 'psycho-figuration'. Her figures tend to be oddly misshapen with puzzling proportions, usually set against a flat painted background. She uses them to examine issues of identity, gender and sexuality.

Fontana has literally cut between the space where the viewer is, through the surface of the canvas, to the space that lies beyond. Fontana saw this as evocative of infinity.

Brancusi attempted to capture the essential qualities of a human face or an animal. Brancusi explained: 'I want just the flash of its spirit.'

Like all Flavin's sculptures, this work was made using pre-fabricated fluorescent tubes. He described it as a 'monument' partly as a joke, aware of the contrast between its modest materials and the traditional grandeur of monumental sculpture.

Cut from aluminium, White Curve hangs at a distance from the wall, creating a spatial dynamic with the architecture of the gallery, part way between a sculpture and a painting.

By making works placed directly on the floor, Andre challenged traditional conventions of sculptural practice and presentation. Venus Forge is an arrangement of metal tiles that emphasise the relationship between sculpture and floor.

The figure is aerodynamically deformed by speed. Boccioni exaggerated the body's dynamism so that it embodied the urge towards progress. The sculpture may reflect ideas of the mechanised body that appeared in Futurist writings

Lichtenstein frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements. Transferring this to a painting context, Lichtenstein could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner, leaving the viewer to decipher meanings for themselves.

The mask-like face, hatched planes and wood-coloured skin of Bust of a Woman resemble an African carving. Enthusiasm for non-European and prehistoric arts had emerged in Picasso`s circle five years earlier.

In the early years of Cubism, Picasso constructed his images using small facets, or geometric planes, and represented objects from different viewpoints.

For many years Richter used photographs as a source for his figurative works. In the mid-1970s he began to incorporate photography into the process of making abstract paintings.

The simplified, angular planes and exaggerated features of this nude suggest the influence of carved figures. Matisse's interest in African art began around 1906, and is probably reflected in this painting.

This waif-like girl is among Picasso¿s cast of people from the margins of society. A melancholic mood is conveyed with veils of paint.

Like many of Oldenburg's sculptures, it renders a familiar object strange through its recreation in surprising materials and colours. The transformation of hard into soft objects is a recurrent theme in his sculpture

This is one of a series of works based on an ordinary three-way electrical plug. In his art Oldenburg transforms ordinary household objects by radical changes of scale, or material.

This work is one of a series that he undertook in the summer of 1960, using the superimposed numbers 0 to 9. Johns let the process of painting the number sequence dictate the structure of the painting.

Like all of Lichtenstein's work this sculpture is ironic. The steel mesh suggests cloud, but it also alludes to the Benday dots used in the printing of comics and newspapers.

The variety of Roth's self-portraits made in the 1970s is remarkable. At the heart of Self-Portrait as Pile of Dog Dirt, Roth pictures himself with recognisable protruding ears in the centre of a fetid vortex.

Ballà believed that the power and speed of machines such as cars were the salient characteristics of the modern age and aimed to express this idea in his work

Calder's work brought a lightness and movement to the traditionally static and solid world of sculpture. Calder first showed 'T and Swallow' under the generic title Mobile in the Abstract and Concrete exhibition in London in 1936.

A crumbling city looms oppressively below the ring-shaped moon. Ernst made a whole series of such works. The imagery may reflect his pessimism as Nazism took hold in his native Germany

The Italian's plunging perspectives and unexpected juxtapositions evoked a mysterious world that led Hillier towards Surrealism. The scale of this anchor-structure is overwhelming, like a monument of unknown significance.

Miró's 'painting-poems' combine painted and written elements. This work was built around the first line of an erotic poem, balancing words and signs

The textures of these lithographs exemplify the technical inventiveness found in Jean Dubuffet's work through which he tried to break the accepted boundaries of art.

Part man, part beast, these howling creatures first appeared in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which Bacon painted during the Second World War.

The furious movement of the two principal figures is placed within a claustrophobic setting, watched over by the portrait, which gives this work a striking intensity.

In the two side panels of this triptych the imagery has a mechanistic, science fiction quality. But in the centre the forms are organic, suggesting references to sexual parts.

The image is laden with Picasso's personal recollections of a triangular affair, which resulted in the heart-broken suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Love, sex and death are linked in an ecstatic dance

These wires, which carry overtones of insect life, were a feature of Richier's sculpture in the 1950s. They reveal the artist's interest in the underlying structure of her figures and of their placement in the space they inhabit

Miró's use of simple shapes and bright colours constitutes a highly personal visual language, often charged with symbolic meaning.

Gorky produced a series of paintings that refer to natural forms. In this painting, amorphous shapes and drips of liquid paint suggest the fluidity of the waterfall.

The startlingly violent image of three interlocking figures was derived from a lost work by the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco showing the fraternal struggle between Cain and Abel

The prominent use of red, white and blue allude to the French tricolour flag, and its revolutionary values of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood.

Picabia painted The Fig-Leaf using glossy household paint over another work entitled Hot Eyes. The original painting, which was based on a technical drawing of a turbine brake, caused a scandal when submitted for an important Paris exhibition in 1921.

Picabia chose to obliterate the features of the face, transforming it into a void overlaid with strange symbols that may have been derived from medieval Catalan frescos

With its warped scale and unexpected combinations of images, Otaïti has a dream-like quality, perhaps reflecting Surrealist preoccupations with the subconscious and the freeing of the imagination.

The title of this painting refers to the date of its completion. Soulages began experimenting with abstraction in 1947, using heavy brushstrokes of black paint against a light background

In the 1940s Giacometti began to make tall, emaciated figures with roughly defined outlines, which appear to represent the human figure seen from a distance.

Guston was an important Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, who controversially returned to figurative work in the late 1960s. His early abstract paintings were composed of shimmering combinations of short vertical and horizontal brushstrokes in pinks, reds and blues.

Northwest Drift is one of several works that reflect his meditative response to landscape. He wrote: "Seattle where I painted this picture is a place of virginal winds, air currents and intermingled seasons... "

Tàpies developed a style that involved covering his canvases with a thick, highly textured base and incorporating into it materials such as clay and marble dust.

Giacometti related this work to his memory of sitting in a Paris brothel and seeing four naked women at the far end of the room. "The distance which separated us, the polished floor, seemed insurmountable in spite of my desire to cross it and impressed me as much as the women", he recalled

His brother Diego, who sat for this bust, was one of his most frequent models. The flattened head allows Giacometti to accentuate the profile, reminiscent of ancient Egyptian figures, yet also convey the psychological intensity of the face viewed from the front.

During the late 1950s Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures, their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender, emaciated forms convey a vivid but fragile human presence.

During the late 1950s Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures, their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender, emaciated forms convey a vivid but fragile human presence

During the late 1950s Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures, their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender, emaciated forms convey a vivid but fragile human presence

This work belongs to a series of eight busts that Giacometti made of his wife Annette from 1962 to 1965. Although Annette was one of his most frequent sitters, Giacometti found himself approaching her anew each time she posed

Giacometti's fragile, elongated figures were seen as reflecting the precariousness and absurdity of life in the inhospitable landscape of war-scarred Europe

In the early 1950s, Burri made a number of works using sacking. Some included the original printing found on the sacks, acknowledging their origins as part of the relief effort for post-war Europe.

Jorn had been a prominent member of CoBrA, a group of northern European artists whose improvisatory approach to painting was intended as a way of liberating their work from repressive bourgeois conventions.

This work belongs to a series that Dubuffet called 'beaten pastes' because the main paint layer resembled butter, into which he scratched the graffiti-like figures. He wrote :"I am at a loss to explain just what it was in these paintings that gave me - that still gives me - such a keen satisfaction".

Dubuffet invented various techniques to portray soil in a series of paintings called 'Texturologies'. For this work, he adapted the 'Tyrolean' technique, used by stone masons to texture newly plastered walls.

"My paintings have no titles because I do not wish them to be considered illustrations or pictorial puzzles", Still wrote. "If properly made visible they speak for themselves".

Although this is an abstract painting, the thick vertical lines that dominate its centre can be seen as trees, with thick knotted roots at their base. It was probably this that led Krasner to call the painting Gothic Landscape, several years after completing it

Poured Painting was made by aggressively throwing bright red paint onto the canvas, evoking associations of splattered and dripping blood. Nitsch was associated with a group of Austrian artists, known as the Vienna Actionists, whose performance-based works were intended to challenge sexual, moral and religious conventions.

Wine-Crucifix was originally painted as an altar-piece for the Student Chapel of the Catholic University in Graz, Austria. It hung loosely, without a frame, across a large window. Light shining through the cloth would reveal the shape of a cross beneath layers of paint. The title of the work evokes the transformation of wine into the blood of Christ

Letter to my Son is one of Jorn¿s most ambitious paintings of the late 1950s, the period in which his international reputation was established. The title refers to his son, Ole, who was born in 1950. It is one of a number of works by Jorn that refer to families and childhood.

By 1951, Pollock had achieved considerable success with his dripped and poured abstract painting, and was widely regarded as the leading young American artist. Perhaps fearing that he was reaching an impasse in his work, he embarked on a series of black and white paintings in which figures emerge, as they had in his early works.

During the Second World War, Fautrier was associated with the French Resistance, and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. Large Tragic Head is one of over thirty paintings and sculptures that he made during the occupation, and suggests the brutal violence of Nazi atrocities.

Fautrier spent most of this period in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Paris. At night, he could hear the Gestapo torture and execute prisoners in the nearby woods. The pitted and scarred surface of Head of a Hostage suggests both individual features and the anonymity of bodies found in mass graves

Woman with a Bag was completed shortly before Schmidt-Rottluff left for military service on the Russian front in autumn 1915. Its first owner felt that the dark colours and tragic expression of the portrait were a response to the misery of wartime

Although this work was painted in Hamburg, it was probably inspired by the artist's regular summer visits to Dangast on the North Sea coast. The dunes, grasslands and fishing villages of this area appear in a number of Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings

Schmidt-Rottluff was primarily a painter, but during the First World War he briefly turned to sculpture. This is one of around twelve carvings influenced by African sculpture that he made in 1917-18

This is one of a series of six seascapes (labelled A ¿ F) which Nolde painted while staying on the island of Sylt in northern Germany. His characteristically expressive brushwork and heightened colour suggest the seething turbulence of the sea

Frize lays his canvases on the floor, and works on them at speed. He is less concerned with the creation of a meaningful image, than the process of painting itself. In Spitz ('sharp' or 'pointed' in German) he laid out the lines in red crayon and then coated the canvas in a liquid resin

This work toured Britain in 1936 in the important exhibition Abstract and Concrete. At this time, Hélion was interested in the definition of shallow space, a concern that he shared with colleagues such as Nicholson and Piper.

In 1920, Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner published the Realistic Manifesto which signaled a move away from representation in favour of a new form of art concerned with space and time.

This work is one of his earliest abstract sculptures. It attempts to give solid form to the relationships between pure, geometric shapes

In the 1930s, he made shallow reliefs in which areas of different depths define actual space. In the most radical of these, colour was reduced to just white or grey to achieve a sense of purity

Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstract painting and worked with geometrical forms from the mid 1920s. Although it makes no reference to the outside world, his work summons up the exciting rhythms of contemporary life

Most of the components of this work were discovered in Gabo's attic in 1977 and reassembled later. The long vertical elements of the original appear to have been glass, so that it would have been even more transparent

Gabo is directly in touch with today', wrote the artist Ben Nicholson in 1936. Gabo's enthusiasm for modernity is exemplified in Monument for an Airport.

Mediterranée is Kelly's first purely abstract relief, an experiment in the shaping of pure, unmodulated colour. Although entirely abstract, the geometric pictorial shapes that Kelly uses always have their basis in the visible reality of his surroundings.

This painting, one of a series that developed from a small black and white study, is called after the famous avenue in New York. Here the red form can also be read as a 'broad way' receding into the distance, Kelly having cropped the edges of the rectangle to imply perspective.

This table-top scene, with its fruit-bowl, violin, bottle and (painted) newspaper, is constructed from areas of colour that resemble cut-out pieces of paper. The background has been left white.

In the late 1920s he began to incorporate natural forms into his work. The curving line down the left-hand side of the painting softens the underlying geometric structure of horizontal and vertical lines, acting as a link to the organic shapes of leaves and shell

Goncharova met her partner, the artist Michel Larionov, in 1900. This painting can be seen as a coded commentary on their life together. The two sides of the work are divided between male (shirts, collars and cuffs) and female (lace, blouses, aprons) items of laundry.

Inspired by Picasso and Braque, Metzinger first worked in a Cubist manner in 1909-10. Thereafter he became a public exponent of what he and like-minded artists saw as the abstract and mathematical foundations of Cubism.

Lipchitz stated that this work represented "a human head with even a feeling of monumental dignity. Yet the entire effect is achieved essentially by two interlocking sculptural planes."

Rivera was a Mexican painter, noted especially for his large mural paintings made from the 1920s onward. He lived in Paris most of the previous decade and painted in a Cubist style between 1913 and 1917

Ordinary objects - a bottle and fishes on a plate, laid on a table with a drawer - have been dramatically fragmented to form a grid-like structure of interpenetrating planes

Works like this were based on simplified figure drawings. Bomberg superimposed a grid to break up the composition into geometric sections. These were painted different colours, partially obscuring the original subject

Henri Gaudier (who added Sophie Brzeska¿s name to his own) carved Seated Woman on the eve of the First World War, though this bronze version was cast long after his death in the trenches. It shows his commitment to a dynamic modernism that made him a key figure in Vorticism in London

Several of Barlach's war memorials were removed from churches in 1937. The Avenger had been made at the beginning of the First World War, when Barlach was a nationalist, and represents the unstoppable force of the German army. A later wooden version was confiscated by the Nazis

This painting of a train arriving in Paris attempts to express movement and conflicting energies through its fractured, interpenetrating forms. Like all the Italian Futurists, Severini was inspired by modern machinery and was enthusiastic about the idea of war.

Dottori joined the Italian Futurist movement in 1913. This painting predates his contact with the Futurists but was nevertheless a response to their desire to paint the 'sensations which everything in nature and human life arouses in us'.

Lewis's painting Workshop epitomises Vorticism's aims, using sharp angles and shifting diagonals to suggest the geometry of modern buildings. Its harsh colours and lines echo the discordant vitality of the modern city in an 'attack on traditional harmony'.

The Large Glass has been described as "a diagram of an ironic love-making machine of extraordinary complexity".This replica was made by the artist Richard Hamilton with Duchamp¿s approval.

After his experiences in the First World War, Léger became convinced that art should be accessible to all. He moved away from pure abstraction towards the stylised depiction of real objects, laying great emphasis on order, clarity and harmony

Discharged from the army for medical reasons, he produced savagely satirical paintings and drawings that "expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment".

A clarinet lies on a mantelpiece at the centre of this playful work. In front of it stands a bottle with the characters, RHU, the first three letters of the French word for rum.

The coffee grinder's handle is shown in multiple positions while, stripped of its outer casing, the mechanism produces the flow of coffee. This diagrammatic approach, reminiscent of a technical manual, reflects Duchamp's fascination with machinery as well as his concern for representing the passage of time

The figure of a clarinet player emerges from a series of block-like forms in this sculpture. Musical subject matter was typical of early works by Picasso and Braque

The subject of this sculpture is a woman, seated with her legs crossed. The tall block is part of the head, and was added, according to the artist, 'to give value to the head, the back of the head.'

This is a plaster cast dating from 1964, made from the moulds of bronze casts made at the same time. Lipchitz referred to it as 'a small sketch' and intended it as a study for a larger Cubist Sculpture

One of the most apocalyptic of Nevinson's paintings, Bursting Shell uses the strong lines and swirling movement of Futurist and Vorticist compositions to recreate the effect of an explosion.

Instead of presenting the single vantage point of traditional painting, Braque and Picasso fragmented the object into a series of geometric facets and planes

Bars and cafés were popular meeting points for artists in Paris, and often featured in their work. The bottle and newspaper in this scene are indicated with a bare minimum of clues, while the fake wood grain suggests a table-top.

This portrait, commissioned from Gustav Klimt, the most controversial artist of the day, clearly announces her as a modern woman, at ease with the bohemian milieu. The sumptuous, theatrical chiffon dress worn by Hermine was probably a Wiener Werkstätte creation and may have been designed by Klimt himself

Matisse treats the patterned fabric of her clothes as an abstracted and almost purely decorative element of the portrait.

The purchase of a car in 1917 allowed Matisse to take all his painting equipment into the woods. He made several works at Trivaux Pond, in the landscaped park of the Bois de Meudon on the outskirts of Paris

The dining table was one of Bonnard's favourite subjects. Its associations with domestic routine and conviviality were in tune with his intimate vision of art

Executed in the south of France, this painting shows a comfortably furnished apartment with a view over the Mediterranean. The sunlit interior suggests relaxation and pleasure, but the painting has a mysterious intensity that seems strangely at odds with the domesticity of the scene.

As this painting indicates, he was generally more concerned than Braque or Picasso with preserving the appearance of reality in his Cubist works

Paolozzi described this collage as divided into two categories of 'contemporary' and 'historical'. The contemporary element consists of largely abstract, coloured patterns made from striped wrapping paper and paper construction kits for children. The historical images include mechanical diagrams from technical instruction manuals from the 1910s

As a boy in Edinburgh Paolozzi collected cigarette cards, comics and 'vulgar novelettes', and stuck images from them into scrapbooks. Inspired by his collections, he decided to become a commercial artist. At the Slade School of Art from 1944-47, he continued to fill scrapbooks with cuttings from comics, film magazines and advertisements.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism.

Since childhood, Paolozzi has kept scrapbooks of images, mostly drawn from American magazines, which he used as a primary source for these collages. They reflect his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as the glamour of American consumerism.

Rauschenberg began making silkscreen paintings in 1962. He would screen-print images from books and magazines, along with his own photographs, onto the canvas, then apply painterly brushstrokes reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism.

Inspired by food, clothing and household appliances, Oldenburg's sculptures introduce surprising modifications in terms of scale, materials and texture.

Artschwager's sculptures are neither real, functional objects nor straightforward representations. They aim to call our attention to their nature as illusions

Seminar was one of many collaborations between Roth and Richard Hamilton. Roth began the process by making one lithographic plate, to which Hamilton responded by adding another layer from a new plate.

The Piccadillies, published by the Petersburg Press in London, offer a sophisticated example of Roth's complex and inventive print-making techniques. The image was taken from a tourist postcard of Piccadilly Circus (which is reproduced on the reverse of each print).

Roth made self-portraits in a variety of media throughout his career, though there was an especial concentration in the mid 1970s. Both this and the adjoining work were made in Iceland, where Roth lived and worked periodically