In the Studio

A horizontal clarinet lies on top of a mantelpiece at the centre of this playful, geometric work. In front stands a bottle with the characters RHU, the first three letters of the French word for rum. The word VALSE (waltz) indicates sheet music, reinforced by fragments of treble and bass clefs found throughout the image. A scrolled form in the lower right could represent part of the mantelpiece, or a violin-head. Braque painted this during a summer he spent with Picasso in the Pyranees. They worked together depicting similar scenes and objects in the same style.

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. Krasner was married to the artist Jackson Pollock. Gothic Landscape was made in the years following his death from a car crash in 1956. It belongs to a series of large canvases whose violent and expressive gestural brushstrokes can be read as a reflection of her grief.

El-Salahi studied painting in Khartoum, Sudan, in the late 1940s. He then completed his studies in London. When he returned to Sudan in 1957 it was a newly independent country in the middle of a civil war. El-Salahi recognised that this new context required a different artistic approach. He started using simple forms, strong lines and sombre colours. He was inspired by his environment and included Arabic and African forms and iconography. In this work El-Salahi captures the moments when memory and dreams, past and present collide.

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’. The original version, given to the composer Erik Satie, was lost but became well-known through Man Ray’s photograph of it. Although made at the height of Paris dada, Cadeau, like Man Ray’s other objects, anticipated the exposure of hidden desires found in subsequent surrealist objects.

Landscape of Longing refers to Arif Quadri’s interest in spiritual quests and journeys. It evokes a map seen from above. Arif Quadri describes the work as ‘a celebration of life with all its inexplicable mysteries’. He relates the painted forms to the sinuous strokes of Islamic calligraphy. The shapes between and around each form are important to the artist. They suggest figurative elements such as female and male figures, or pods and birds. Arif Quadri is influenced by texts ranging from Sufi writings to work by Dante, the 13th century Italian poet.

A surgeon during the First World War, Pailthrope later trained in psychological medicine and criminal psychology before undergoing Freudian analysis. With her partner, Reuben Mednikoff, she made paintings which they submitted to detailed analysis. They showed in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and, in 1940, moved to the United States, where Pailthorpe made this painting. Unconscious images from the earliest moments of life fill her work, here in the form of an unborn foetus. She wrote of their research that ‘Surrealism can lead to a greater understanding of the world around and within us’.