In the early half of the eighteen hundreds the French Neo-Classical painter Ingres sneeringly described the younger Romantic painter Delacroix as “a disciple of ugliness”. A century later the French novelist Jean Genet claimed that “Ugliness is Beauty at rest.” Between these two events stretches the Romantic revolution in art.

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. M C Escher

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955 In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg, a young, little known artist, took a box of erasers and set to rubbing out a densely layered drawing by Willem de Kooning, the king of Abstract Expressionism, and he did it with the Master’s permission. Rauschenberg has said that he was “trying to find a way [...]

Redon was born into a prosperous Bordeaux family and began drawing at the age of ten. As a young child he suffered from epilepsy and was sent away to live with his Uncle on the family vineyard at Peyrelebade in the Medoc, where he experienced the “full solitude of the countryside”. It was perhaps here that he formed the fusion of the natural and the fantastic that characterised his work as a graphic artist.

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