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.