By the time he was twenty-six, John Singer Sargent (1856-1926) had mastered a style of portraiture that challenged the conventions of the genre. The daughters of Edward D. Boit and Madame X(Fig.1), exhibited at successive Paris Salons in 1883 and 1884, reveal Sargent's command of the articulation of space and his sophisticated understanding of the psychological complexity of his sitters. Yet, this very mastery provoked an expression of concern by Sargent's fellow expatriate Henry James: '[he] has . . . a certain sort of excess of cleverness: too much chic and not enough naivite. His character is disarmingly naif, but not his talent'. ' It may be significant that James's doubts surfaced at the height of Sargent's experimentation with ways of portraying masculinity and femininity during what has been described as the 'gender crisis' of the fin de siecle.2 Sargent's early portraits, exemplified in his Fanny Watts of 1877 and Dr Pozzi of 1881, at times challenged late nineteenth-century notions of gender difference and did so during a period in which conservative groups felt it increasingly necessary to preserve the unequivocal demarcation of separate spheres for men and women. In France, where such concerns were provoked in part by defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and consequent fears of the emasculation of French men,3 visual culture played a crucial role in promoting gesture and pose as indicators of sexual difference. For portrait artists who relied on commissions, these conservative notions were seriously considered.

For over forty years scholars have been advancing the understanding of Francis Picabia's machinist works of 1915-22 by analysing the inscriptions and identifying the machine parts depicted. ' Detective work is necessary because Picabia left few clues as to his sources or his exact intentions, and some works remain incompletely understood. In this article I suggest a re-examination of a group of works produced in 1915-17, at the time of Picabia's American sojourn during the First World War. Several of them appeared as illustrations to 291, the magazine Picabia produced in collaboration with Alfred Stieglitz's gallery of that name, or in 391, Picabia's own magazine published in Barcelona.

The text that follows is an edited version of an interview given by Victor Pasmore (Fig51) to Nicholas Watkins on 14th September 1995. It took place in London at Marlborough Fine Art, Pasmore's dealer for many years, during the last one-man exhibition devoted to the artist in his lifetime. (Pasmore died at his home in Malta aged eighty-nine on 23rd January 1998.) His evident enthusiasm and willingness to talk was partly the result of his excitement at seeing a large body of his recent paintings and prints brought together in a different space and light from those of his studio in Malta. The questions put to him cover the trajectory of his career but with specific emphasis on the transition from his early Euston Road School figuration to his later abstraction, and on the influence of his Peterlee New Town project in County Durham on his subsequent change from making reliefs back to painting on canvas.

One little-known outcome of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, mounted at the Grafton Galleries, London, by Roger Fry in the winter of 1912-13, was the temporary alliance forged in reaction to aspects of the show by Jacques and Gwen Raverat, Stanley Spencer and Eric Gill. Though fired with idealism, it was undermined by religious differences and did not achieve what it set out to do. Nevertheless its aims and ambitions set a precedent for Spencer's subsequent decorations for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, near Newbury, Berkshire. It is also accountable for some little-known frescoes in Cambridge.

The reception of Philip Guston's late work has been burdened by the old modernist antagonism between figuration and abstraction. Consequently much time has been devoted to trying to discover the formal or emotional continuities that would finally allow Guston's career to 'make sense'.' While most commentators now accept his reconversion to figuration around 1970, few have sought to analyse individual paintings, to discern the particular meanings and references of Guston's figures and objects or the nature of his narratives. Such attention to specifics reveals that in Guston's late work figuration was not conceived in terms of any familiar debate on abstraction versus representation. Guston's rejection of the top- heavy rigour of Abstract Expressionism was not primarily a defence of the figure. Nor was it merely a return to story telling, in spite of the bluster of his initial claims ('I got sick and tired of all that purity! Wanted to tell stories ') 2 It was rather a rejection of what he took to be Abstract Expressionism's misguided attempt to transcend time and history Guston's paintings, even through his abstract years, inevitably contained images, at best highly ambiguous ones, and it was the sheer historical contingency of their arrangement in painting that counted. To put the matter simply but not inaccurately: in the late Guston paintings narrative is the main event It should not be assumed, however, that either the form or the function of such a narrative was simple.