Artists beginning with F

Jean Fautrier - Remains (1945)

Reeling from atrocities witnessed during the wartime occupation of France, Fautrier began a series of paintings of human fragments quivering as if still barely alive against a chillingly vacuous backdrop. Heavy with smeared impasto, they are tactile embodiments of unnecessary pain. (RC)

Ian Hamilton Finlay - Little Sparta (1966-2006)

On the edge of the Pentland Hills, Little Sparta continues the neoclassical tradition of gardens including poetry and philosophy. Ian Hamilton Finlay embellished the landscape with more than 275 of his artworks, incorporating words and images that allude to a dazzling array of histories, ideas and narratives. A mesmerising open-air integration of nature and culture. (EM)

Dan Flavin - Monument for V Tatlin 1 (1964)

Dan Flavin was the artist who transformed utilitarian strip lights into cool, abstract sculptures, the most successful of which are a series of elegant, minimalist structures he made in homage to Vladimir Tatlin, the artist who conceived the utopian testimonial to the Third International. (JL)

Lucio Fontana - Concetto Spaziale, Teatrino (1965)

Born in Argentina, the son of a Milanese sculptor, Fontana founded spatialism, which combined elements of Dada, concrete art and tachism. You what? It's not important. Just accept that he was trying to create art for a new age. His slashed canvases can be seen around the world and in this series, of about 170 works, he playfully makes shapes in a boxlike laquered frame and puts holes in the canvas. (MB)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard - The Swing (1766), The Stolen Kiss (c1766)

In Fragonard's perfumed world a young woman kicks her white- stockinged legs in the air as she floats on a swing in a luscious garden, a scene of utter triviality except that it's painted with such talent you can smell the flowers and feel the motion of the air as she soars in space. (JJ)

Piero della Francesca - Baptism of Christ (late 1440s-1450s), Misericordia Altarpiece (1445-1560), Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle (c1450s), Flagellation of Christ (1455-1460), Madonna and Child with Saints (mid-1470s), Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro (c1474), The Nativity (1470s-1480s)

Piero is a mathematican whose calculations lead to simple, unpretentious spirituality; a composer of formal geometrical scenes who intensely captures the local faces and life of his region; a paradoxical and awesome visionary.

In his Baptism of Christ, a pale-fleshed Christ stands in a shallow stream on a dry plain. Angels and other, enigmatic figures witness the moment. In the distance, we can see the walls and towers of a little town — Sansepolcro on the border of Tuscany and Umbria, where Piero was born and spent most of his life. Trained as a painter in Florence, he did important works for Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino; his portraits of Federico and his wife Battista are moving with their sombre profiles set against beautiful receding landscapes. But in spite of such patronage, Piero was extremely loyal to his own town and his own landscape. He sat on the town council of Sansepolcro most of his life. He expressed his belief in the nurturing bonds of community in his Madonna of the Misericordia, which portrays the townspeople enfolded within the gown of a colossal Virgin.

Plain, unadorned peasant faces look out of his scenes with their white rocks and eggshell-blue skies. Even his courtiers look ordinary — in his cycle of frescoes narrating the Legend of the True Cross in Arrezzo, capital of his little region, the retinue of the Queen of Sheba are as serious and pure as young townswomen going to church.

It's all a stately dream, rooted in the day to day, and yet at the core of it is pure mathematics: Piero's understanding of proportion and geometry, which makes his view of Arezzo on its hilltop look like a cubist landscape and enables him to suspend an ostrich egg above a Madonna with perfect oval symmetry, is based on deep studies of Archimedes and Euclid. He wrote important books on perspective and geometry that were left unpublished when he died and, claimed his biographer Vasari, plagiarised by others. (JJ)

Robert Frank - Mabou (Sick of Goodbyes) (1978)

Tiring of his renown as an on-the-road photographer of the dark and dusty side of the American dream, Frank turned to painfully sensitive imagery and the intimacy of Polaroids. The gloss is defaced, the subjects distressed. Few photo-artists have come near the raw emotional resonance of his visual poetry. (RC)

Lucian Freud - Naked Man, Back View (1991-1992)

Lucian Freud made a series of grotesquely beautiful portraits of the charismatic transvestite performance artist Leigh Bowery. In Naked Man, Back View, we contemplate Bowery's colossal back, a fleshy mound of subtle pinks and greys that reveal Bowery to be Freud's greatest muse. (JL)

Caspar David Friedrich - The Monk by the Sea (c1809), The Abbey in the Oak Wood (c1809), Village Landscape in Morning Light (1822)

There are few experiences of art quite as unexpected and disturbing as an encounter with Friedrich's paintings. The first time you see them in Berlin it is like walking through a mirror into a world of total Romantic solitude and emptiness. The Monk by the Sea stands contemplating a black oceanic void. A desolate ruined abbey sits in dreary woods, an oak tree twists alone under the sky. Friedrich's smooth, precise method makes his visions all the more uncanny. (JJ)

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

A voluptuous woman lies asleep, supine under a demon, whose hideous features are turned to face the viewer. This is Henry Fuseli's erotic masterpiece — made, it is thought, in a fit of unrequited love. (JL)