Emotion, nature and physical expression collide in Joan Mitchell's abstract paintings and prints. Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell spent formative periods of her career in New York and Paris. Her large abstract canvases and gestural approach to mark-making led to her affiliation with abstract expressionism. She was one of eleven women included in the movement's first formal presentation - the 9th Street Exhibition held in New York in 1951. Despite this, Mitchell became known as a 'second generation abstract expressionist', a title she considered a 'put-down.

For Mitchell, abstraction wasn't just a means of expression, it was also a way to connect with the outside world. In 1955, she began dividing her time between France and the US, moving to Paris in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell relocated to Vétheuil, thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. Her house, La Tour, overlooked the River Seine and was surrounded by lush trees and fields of flowers. While Mitchell found the environment inspiring her work remained abstract. She commented, 'I could certainly never mirror nature. . I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.'

The open-plan layout of Mitchell's painting studio in Vétheuil allowed her to work with greater freedom than previous studios permitted. Photographs from the time show the artist surrounded by her enormous, multi-panel paintings. The size of these canvases required an athletic approach to painting, perhaps influenced by her experience as a champion figure skater in her youth.

Most of the works presented here were created in the last two decades of Mitchell's life, a period marked by the deaths of several important figures, and her own cancer diagnosis. Despite this, painting remained a means of existence for Mitchell, 'Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint... And painting is what allows me to survive.'

André Fougeron 1913-1998
Born and worked France
Civilisation atlantique 1953
Atlantic Civilisation
Oil paint on canvas

Fougeron intended this work, first shown in Paris in 1953, to be an unsettling image. He uses harsh caricatures and stereotypes to criticise the Americanisation of Europe. A businessman representing France greets a US car, symbolising capitalism. His appearance is an antisemitic stereotype, conforming to Communist propaganda in the 1950s. At the time, Fougeron was associated with the French Communist Party. The artist depicts the US soldier reading pornographic magazines, a Black child shining shoes, and Algerian refugees sheltering under corrugated iron to condemn US global power, the exploitation of the underprivileged, and French colonialism in Africa.

Cildo Meireles

Babel 2001, a tower of radios playing at once, addresses ideas of information overload and failed communication.

Cildo Meireles refers to Babel as a 'tower of incomprehension.' Comprising hundreds of radios, each tuned to a different station, the sculpture relates to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. God was offended by this structure, and caused the builders to speak in different languages. No longer able to understand one another, they became divided and scattered across the earth, and so began all mankind's conflicts.

Babel consists of analogue radios of varying ages, from large valve radios dating trom the 1920s, which make up the bottom tiers of the tower, to the smaller mass-produced electronic radios of more recent years, which form its summit. By using radios of decreasing size from the floor to the ceiling, Meireles enhances the sense of the tower's height.

'The quantity and diversity of radios and all the different types of sound objects' that he saw in the bargain shops of New York's Canal Street inspired the Brazilian artist's choice of material. 'Radios are interesting because they are physically similar and at the same time each radio is unique,' Meireles has commented. Likewise, the noise produced by Babel is constant, but the precise mix of broadcast voices and music is always changing, so that no two experiences of this work are ever the same.

Dod Procter 1892-1972
Born and worked Britain
Morning 1926
Oil paint on canvas

This was voted Picture of the Year at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1927 and bought for the nation by the Daily Mail newspaper. From about 1922 Dod Procter had begun to paint a series of simple, monumental portraits of young women that she knew, utilising the fall of light across the figures to give a powerful sense of volume. The model was Cissie Barnes, the sixteen year old daughter of a fisherman from Newlyn, the Cornish village that was home to Dod Procter for most of her working life. The popularity of this painting led to its being displayed in New York, followed by a tour of Britain from 1927 to 1929.

René Magritte 1898-1967
Born Belgium, worked Belgium, France
Man with a Newspaper 1928
L'Homme au journal
Oil paint on canvas

Magritte's disconcertingly deadpan style is seen clearly in these four simply painted scenes, which seem to be indistinguishable apart from the disappearance of the man of the title. They were based on an illustration in a popular health manual. There are slight changes of perspective between the four panels, which add to the disquieting effect, and may relate to the displacement of images in early 3-D viewing devices. This subtle undermining of the everyday was characteristic of Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist colleagues, who preferred quiet subversion to overt public action.

Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920
Born Italy, worked Italy and France
The Little Peasant c.1918
Oil paint on canvas

This is one of a small group of paintings that Modigliani made of young people. There is some doubt over the accuracy of the title, as the same model seems to appear in another portrait by the artist, titled The Young Apprentice. Modigliani had long been influenced by the painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). This work may have been inspired by Cézanne's paintings of country workers, depicted through solid but simplified shapes. Cézanne's subjects were also positioned in the centre of the canvas and painted in mostly blue tones. In 1919, Modigliani began to paint the more elongated figures for which he is best known.

Yamashita Kikuji 1919-1986
Born and worked Japan
Deification of a Soldier 1967
Oil paint on canvas

The title of this work suggests that a soldier is being worshipped as if they were a god. However, the imagery is chaotic and violent. With screaming mouths, distorted animal forms and disembodied limbs, it captures the absurdity of war. Yamashita made this painting at the height of the Vietnam War, also known locally as the American War, which was protested extensively in Japan. It also reflects Yamashita's traumatic memories of the second world war. As a conscript in the Imperial Japanese army, he witnessed many atrocities and took part in the killing of a Chinese prisoner.