I have often said, in the way one doe, when asked the question, 'When did you first want to be an artist?' 'Well, I've wanted to be a painter since the age of five.' When thinking about what I was going to say, I wondered why I particularly chose that date, other than the fact that I told someone at the time. And I think it was because of the picture over the mantelpiece that I became aware, at a very early age - as I am sure did everybody in this room - of pictures as things like tables, chairs, cups and saucers and so on. That conviction about the nature of pictures has perhaps saved me, helped me and protected me since. 

IN April 1934 Rodrigo Moynihan and his associates exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery the Objective Abstractions which were so much discussed twenty years later, when the informal, paint-generated vein of abstract painting, anticipated by Moynihan and Tibble, emerged as the dominant international style of the mid-century. The rationale of Objective Abstraction was propounded in an equally far-seeing review of the exhibition by David Gascoyne; the present writer discussed the paintings, the theory and the review in an introduction to the catalogue of Moynihan's retrospective exhibition four years ago. 

THE acquisition of Max Beckmann's Carnival of 1920 represents the most decisive commitment yet made by the Tate Gallery to twentieth-century German art. The majority of paintings from Beckmann's heroic New Sachlichkeit phase (roughly 1918-250 are in German or American museums.