Like dreamers do: The lyrical mark-making of a modern maestroWith a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893 1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction.Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of bourgeois art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early...

Readymade man
Changing the course of 20th-century art

When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887 1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist s Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that continue to reverberate to the present day.

Duchamp made a career out of challenging our notions of what art is and, in the process, opened our minds to hitherto unknown possibilities. After an oblique...