“We should pity the age which finds its reflection in this ‘art’”, wrote one critic in 1911, after seeing too many Vienna Secession paintings. From the quotation marks, we see the despairing critic was attacking the art rather than the age. Nonetheless one is inclined to agree: with the Hapsburg Empire on the brink of collapse, with war on the horizon, and Vienna itself a hotbed of neuroses and anti-Semitism, we should indeed pity the age, and the society and the artists that reflected it.

Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land.

“Charming” is undoubtedly a double-edged word. Along with its perfumed allure, it carries a whiff of insincerity, of something slick and not quite earned. Add “whimsical” and you know you’re in danger of saccharine overload.  Chagall is both, plus he’s one of the most popular artists of the 20^th century. Does it get any worse?

It’s the centenary of the birth of William Scott, once considered to be in the pantheon of British postwar artists. But where’s the hoopla and fanfare? Like so many British painters who had their glory years in the Fifties – before the explosion of Pop art and all that – his name no longer carries much weight. Having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1958, he was left out of the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey British Art of the 20^th Century some 30 years later. To what do we owe so much neglect?

If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), the eponymous anti-hero of Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece. And since it's not too often that stagings of the opera actually address the issue of his profession there is an added immediacy.

After the marvellous Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the BBC has once again rummaged through its documentary archives, this time to see what artists have to say for themselves. Artists are often not the most loquacious breed, which is why they communicate best in the language of images and objects. But it can certainly be instructive to get the lowdown straight from the horse’s mouth, even if it ends up being all performance and no insight.

Saloua Raouda Choucair began her career as a painter, initially studying under Lebanon’s two leading landscape artists, Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In the late 1940s, she trained in the studio of Fernande Léger while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her exposure to art in her native Beirut would have given no hint of the vibrant modernism she would embrace, albeit several decades after Europe had been all aflush with the new.

One can immediately see the influence of Manet and Whistler, especially Whistler, the fellow American who spent most of his life in Paris and London. George Bellows, the first quintessentially American artist of the 20^th century, made famous in his native country painting the heaving masses of New York City and the unrestrained violence in its unlicensed boxing clubs, looked first to his European antecedents, though he never left his native shores. 

It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20^th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture.

In Yo Picasso!, a self-portrait from 1901 (pictured below, Private Collection), the 19-year-old Picasso is already projecting an inimitable bravura, emphasised by his dashing orange cravat. He looks out at us with that mesmerising and legendary, unwavering and intimidating stare he made his own. Even at the time, critical responses noted his courage and confidence. He had made the first of his several moves to Paris in the spring of that year. And here Picasso undertook perhaps the most significant of his many metamorphoses.