MARCEL DUCHAMP

Part joke, part conceptual artwork, part legally binding financial document, the Monte Carlo Bonds capture so much of what was brilliant, chaotic and confounding about the great Marcel Duchamp. Having once again tried to abandon his calling as an artist, Duchamp spent night after night in the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, devising what he thought was a perfect system for roulette involving increasingly intricate dice rolls to decide the numbers to bet on. It was slow, economical and, he said, played over enough time tipped the odds to give him a slight edge over the house, guaranteeing eventual profit. Yet the process was slow using Duchamp’s capital and so he looked outwards, offering friends the chance to buy into his scheme if only they would front him the money. Those that did, received these bonds in return, which entitled them to profit shares after every 100,000^th roll on the wheel. Even in his attempted rejection of art, Duchamp made the world conceptual and beautiful.

CARAVAGGIO

In domesticity, holiness can appear. The sublime enters daily life and interrupts routine, and we may not recognise it without being told. Such is the story of the resurrected Jesus appearing in the town of Emmaus that the great Renaissance master Caravaggio depicts here. Two disciples, Luke and Cleophas, and an innkeeper are having dinner when Christ appears in a different form, here represented as without his beard, and joins them. They do not recognise him at first, and it is only when he has broken bread to they realise that they are in the presence of their teacher and the Son of God, risen from the dead. Just as soon as they do, he vanishes before their eyes and is not seen again. Caravaggio paints this moment of realisation, the two men in awe while the innkeeper looks on, seemingly oblivious to their moment of clarity. The painting does not emphasise holiness, Christ’s glory is unexalted, he is but a man, though more delicate and pure than the rugged disciples either side of him. This is the height of Jesus’ humanity, so at one with the mortal that he is able to join them for dinner as an equal and Caravaggio urges us not to ignore where the glory of god may appear in our daily, domestic lives.

GEORGES BRAQUE

To upend art history, you have to be committed to its traditions. For Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who together created the visual vocabulary of modernity, this tradition began and would be dismantled with the ‘Still Life’. Using the motifs, objects and arrangements that have pervaded painted works for centuries, they disorientate the viewer while giving just enough context and knowledge to ground them. To look at Braque’s work today is to see it fitting neatly within the very art history he sought to topple, but this still life was a radical work. We are given the base of a table, its legs strangely foreshortened but it places us within a known entity. So too, the objects are familiar iconography – fruit, a guitar, a stoneware jug, music sheets and others. Yet each object has it’s own perspective, it does not conform within a singular vision but instead shows a world of multiplicity. Braque’s table could be viewed from infinite angles and still the objects upon it would never unify.