I knew I had a lot to do today. Apart from all the Viennese stuff, I had spotted an ad for an exhibition at a Hofburg gallery called the Albertina: Monet Picasso. I had taken it that this would be a smackdown between the two heavyweights of early 20th century art, but (with just three Monets, ten Picassos) it was much more than that. Apart from pictures by Renoir, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch and Modigliani, there was this by Sisley, from 1885:

I always forget, with the Impressionists, how early they were doing this stuff. Even – decades even – before World War I came along, they were already deconstructing the basic elements of vision into blocks of colour, like this Matisse, in 1905:

Then came Picasso, getting there (Pots and Lemons) in 1907:

while by 1911 (Glass and Apple) he had blown the whole still life thing apart (spot the glass and apple…)

Beyond that, there were so many amazing paintings in there that I could spend all day, so I’ll just show you a few here in whatever form I can find them (some of poor quality, I’m afraid), in chronological order of when they were painted. That excludes some I would love to have included by Braque, Chagall, Giacometti and Max Ernst, among others, but there we go…

So first, and the only other one from before World War I (1912 in fact) this painting of the Italian port city of Genoa by Alexandra Exter, a Russian whom I had never heard of before:

Also by Alexandra Exter, from 1916-18, Dynamic Colours (Blue, White, Red)

Then a Monet Water Lily Pond, from 1917-19:

And his House Among The Roses, from 1925:

Paul Klee, Steamboat in the Harbour (1925):

Kandinsky: Inner Alliance (1929):

Emil Nolde: Garden With Autumn Flowers (1934):

Joan Miro: Metamorphosis (1936):

Klee again: Most Respectfully Yours (1937):

Picasso again: Still Life With Guitar (1942):

And finally, Miro again, from 1949: Woman in Front of the Sun:

So that was it. Or rather it wasn’t it – that’s just all I can show you. And I hadn’t even started on the painters from Vienna yet…