Mid-Century America was a place of space-age futurism, Doo-Wop diners and the curvaceous glory of stream-line moderne. It was exuberant, it was giggly, it was full of joy. Read More

The all-encompassing contempt for class systems, the ‘discard-everything-standard’-ism, and Duchamp’s prolific self-ironising epitomise Dadaism. Its humour is black as night. Read More

She knows that to conceal is to intrigue. She understands, as did Anne-Marie Beretta before her, that sometimes more is more. That to choose not to reveal – to wear collars up, high necklines, outlandish masks – is to pique curiosity. Read More

The Photo-Secessionists believed in photography as art. Reportage or documentary didn’t interest them. They championed subjectivity and manipulation, wanted to secede from convention and make images that were painterly. Read More

The ultra-stylised, look-don't-touch eroticism of Serge Lutens was a dominant theme in fashion and beauty throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Read More

Close up… now closer, closer still, until the object you’re seeing comes loose from its context and gets all weird and sacramental, a fetish, a meditation. Read More

Nature, organic shapes, geometric abstraction and Brazilian genius meet hot hot hot sunshine in the exuberantly Modernist urban design of Lucio Costa and Roberto Burle Marx Read More

THE BUENOS AIRES AFFAIR: Could you be the most beautiful room in the world? Why Jean-Michel Frank's interiors for the Kavanagh Building in Buenos Aires bring tears to the modernist aesthete's eyes. Read More