Artists beginning with M (part one)

Paul McCarthy - The Painter (1995)

In a scatological theatre of self-torturing abstract expressionism, the goon-voiced McCarthy, made up with bulbous balloon nose and rubber sausage fingers, cack-handedly flounces his penile dauber and gives the willies to scheming dealers and corrupt critics. Quite possibly the most insightful video-film ever made about a painter. (RC)

Steve McQueen - Deadpan (1997)

A timber facade of a house falls straight towards the camera with its window placed to exactly surround the stony-faced artist. This re-enactment of a Buster Keaton routine becomes, as it is repeated, an increasingly massive physical fact in McQueen's formidable cinematic sculpture. (JJ)

Renè Magritte - A Courtesan's Palace (1928), The Betrayal of Images (1929), Not to Be Reproduced (1937), Time Transfixed (1939)

'This is not a pipe' - the warning in French beneath Magritte's even-toned, smooth, matter-of-fact painting of what does in fact look like a pipe is 20th century art's most lucid declaration that the certainties and useful simplifications of four centuries of pictorial painting are at an end. The skill to shade rounded objects so they appear solid was once new and precious. In his painting of a pipe, The Betrayal of Images, Magritte announces the futility of such efforts: painting things so they look real has now become a cheap, banal technical skill.

His painting illustrates this by its unexceptional mastery of the basics of design - the circular top of the pipe bowl is a foreshortened disc with a void within it, drawn with sterile academic precision. Yet the meaning of the picture and the future of art lies in the neat handwriting beneath: Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Magritte paints ironically. He is no more impressed by the energies of avant-garde style than he is by traditional conventions of representation. The fun for him lies in reproducing those conventions deadpan, so as to be able to calmly expose the betrayal of images. (JJ)

Kasimir Malevich - Black Square (1915)

The cracked dry surface of this painting is a relic of a revolution in art and life. The black square within a white square border once hung like an icon in the corner of a St Petersburg gallery as the banner of Suprematism - out of the end of the existing cosmos, a new reality would arise. (JJ)

Edouard Manet - The Fife Player (1866), Emile Zola (1868), Dèjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863), Olympia (1863), The Balcony (1868-1869), A Bar at the Folies Bergères (1882), The Execution of Maximilian (1867-1868), Music in the Tuileries (c1860), Alabama and Kearsarge (1864), Argenteuil (1874)

The son of a well-to-do official in the justice ministry in Paris, Manet was a bourgeois who went off with the avant-gardistes and died the traditional avant-gardistes' way: prematurely, with syphilis.

The forerunner and hero of the impressionists, he took subjects and ideas from the Old Masters and launched them into his own modern world - too brutally for many of his detractors, though you could hardly call his work realist. Olympia is a reworking of Giorgione/Titian's Sleeping Venus - but instead of a goddess slumbering in nature, his sexy creature is a prostitute tricked out in silk mules, with a gold bracelet round her wrist, a flower in her hair and a velvet ribbon at her neck.

Her decorated nakedness seems almost fetishistic. At her feet, a cat arches its back in pleasure. In the background, instead of an idealised landscape, is a black servant who deferentially offers the courtesan a bouquet of flowers from a client.

The prostitute looks out of the canvas not exactly invitingly, but perhaps with a hint of challenge. When it was exhibited at the Salon, two security guards were detailed to protect it from the aggressive canes and umbrellas of the public. One contemporary journalist wrote: 'People crowd about Manet's rancid Olympia as though they were at the morgue. When art descends as low as this, it does not even deserve a note of censure.'

It created a scandal - as did Dèjeuner sur l'Herbe. That painting too had an impeccable Old Master as its forerunner, Giorgione's Pastoral Concert. This time, though, the fully clothed men picnicking in the picture were identifiably art students, the naked girl not a nymph, but a modern woman. As in Olympia, the sexual politics of this work are controversial.In A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, another woman gazes impassively at the viewer (or at least at the gentleman whose face is reflected in the mirror behind her). She is selling drinks, oranges and, perhaps, herself. (CH)

Andrea Mantegna - Camera Picta (1465-1474)

Cheeky cherubs look down from a parapet in the blue sky seen through a wide round hole above your head - but they are painted illusions. So is the sky, so is the aperture. Around the walls, lifelike portraits of the Court of Mantua play out an everyday drama. (JJ)

Piero Manzoni - Artist's Shit (1961)

No one has ever mocked the cult of artistic genius quite as succinctly as Manzoni with this small tin can labelled with what it contains, merda d'artista. It looks like something you might buy at a delicatessen in arty, foody Italy. (JJ)

Chris Marker - La Jetèe (1962), Sans Soleil (1983)

In a rat-infested post-nuclear Paris, survivors attempt to regain peace through time travel. The artist is selected as the subject of experiments attempting to recover memories and project them into the future: 'a twice-lived fragment of time'.

Told through a sequential collage of stark black-and-white stills and a masterpiece of voice-over, La Jetèe is a stunned reflection on the variabilities of emotional time, set to the backbeat of an over-stimulated heart.

Sans Soleil takes the theme even further with visual and verbal cross-associations of remarkable plaintive resonance. An anonymous cameraman travels through Japan and Africa recording 'things that quicken the heart' as his letters are read by their anonymous female recipient. We see cat cemeteries, a bonfire for laying to rest the souls of broken dolls and a spellbinding 1/24th of a second glance from a beautiful African woman that somehow affords time a spatial dimension. (RC)

Brice Marden - Cold Mountain 5 (Open) (1989-1991)

There is a flow and freedom and cool grace to Brice Marden's paintings, as if the dripped abstractions of Jackson Pollock had been remade by a Buddhist saint. This art is all on its own in its confident and captivating continuation of the abstract tradition. (JJ)

Simone Martini - Maestà (1315), Guidoriccio da Fogliano (1328), Annunciation (with Lippo Memmi) (1333)

One of the most atmospheric wall paintings in Italy is a portrait of a medieval knight riding across a battlefield in Siena's communal palace. It has traditionally been ascribed to the wonderful 14th-century painter Simone Martini, but is Guidoriccio da Fogliano really by him at all - and is it even truly medieval?

It has been argued that it is an 18th-century fake. Even without that chivalrous scene, Simone Martini's works are more than notable, especially his rhapsodic golden Annunciation with its elegant vase of lilies, sinuously curving figures, and narrow eyes exchanging holy excitement. (JJ)

Masaccio - Tribute Money (1420s), Expulsion (1420s), Trinity (c1426-1427)

Eve howls at the sky, her face collapsing in despair, and Adam places his face in his hands desolately as the Angel of the Lord shepherds them out of the gate of Paradise, in the most harrowing scene in one of Italy's great fresco cycles. Masaccio, who died young and left comparatively few works, was one of the greats of all time, thought Leonardo da Vinci. As for Michelangelo, he spent so much time in front of Masaccio's frescoes in Florence's Brancacci Chapel that other art students thought he was acting like the place was his alone and one of them, Pietro Torrigiani, assaulted him there and broke his nose.

Michelangelo's drawing after the great scene of the Expulsion still survives in the Louvre. It was the monumental authority of Masaccio that so impressed them and that remains so impressive today - especially since a restoration removed the coyly placed fig leaf that for centuries had stopped anyone seeing what Michelangelo saw. (JJ)

Master of Saint Francis - Frescoes in Upper Church of San Francesco (13th century)

The Italian Renaissance begins with Saint Francis of Assisi, whose homely Christian vision rooted itself in everyday life and influenced the rise of a more emotional, human art that glows in the frescoes in Assisi, often attributed to Giotto himself. (JJ)