What goes to make a legend of a work of art? It can help if the work is a watershed in the history of art, but that is neither suflicient nor essential. One factor that can be effective is a remarkable genesis, which could mean, for example, a magically easy birth or one that was prolonged and diflicult or one that was shrouded in mystery. A second factor is the work's initial reception by the public and critics - an especially wild success or hostile rejection, either of which is usually provoked by daring and newness in style and/or subject matter. This factor overlaps with a third: a remarkable subject, one that is either intriguing, as with the Naked maja or the Mona Lisa, or disturbing, whether seriously shocking as with The raft of the Medusa, or offending against modesty as with Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Peter Lanyon's correspondence with Naum Gabo began in the early 1940s, when Lanyon was serving with the RAF and continued until shortly before his death in 1964. Nine of Lanyon's letters, five of which are published here, are housed with the Gabo papers in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In the case of Kitaj we do not need to pry behind the work to find the biography; on the contrary, the work itself mimes and elaborates it, giving his painting in the last fifteen years an unusual demand on the viewer. It is as if the images have been charged with a psychological function which veers outside the boundaries we normally set for painting and then demands our acquiescence. This biographical character of the recent work is not a matter of illustration - although it is sometimes that as well - but of giving painting a certain kind of voice; it also suggests how we might better appreciate the arcane connexions and manipulations in Kitaj's work of twenty and even thirty years ago.

the career of Joseph Albers  as both artist and teacher began in the most famous and influential art school of the twentieth century, the Bauhaus. He participated in the development of its radically Modernist programme integratlng the teachlng of art, design and architecture. His basic ideas, values, and methods were formed there, and he continued to refine them throughout his life. When he came to America in 1933 to teach at the newly founded Black Mountain College, he brought with him something of the spirit of the Bauhaus ideal, of the essence of European Modernism itself.  Arriving at Yale University's School of Art Architecture in as Chairman of the Department of Design, Albers was moving from the enlightened radical fringe of American education to one of its most powerful conservative institutions. That same year, at the age of sixty-two, he began the great series of paintings for which he is best known, Homage to the  square (Fig.42).