Blue has a value like no other colour. At one point, more valuable than gold, the colour Blue only existed as one mineral – lapis lazuli. It is the rarest colour in the natural world. Animals and plants that may look Blue are actually devoid of the colour – they refract light in a wavelength…

4. Pavel Filonov 1883 – 1941 ‘Composition’ 1929 Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov was a prominent Russian art theorist, painter. He was born on January 8, 1883 in Moscow. He initially studied in the studio of academician L Dmitriev-Kavkazsky for five years and in 1908, aged 25, entered the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1912, he…

3. Lyubov Popova  1889 – 1924 ‘Spatial Force Construction’ 1920-21 A movement, central to the development of abstract art, took place in Russia just prior to the 1917 revolution. This was ‘constructivism’. This was at first three-dimensional objects, connected by industrial processes and envisaged to be relevant to the new society. But it later developed to…

2. Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) ‘Composition XVI’ Of course the name Mondrian conjures up the image of regimented black lines and primary colour block paintings. They have become synonymous, and almost a cliché, with anything modern. At the time he painted these they must have been completely bewildering and alien. But they didn’t just…