This strange year began and ended with survey exhibitions of two influential giants of 20th-century art.

Picasso and Paper filled the Royal Academy’s large exhibition rooms from January to August, while Bruce Nauman’s ongoing exhibition at Tate Modern opened in October. Their subjects and materials may differ but by cracking open the sacred aesthetic canons of their respective eras, both artists dramatically widened the forms of expression for future generations.

Curated in a refreshingly straightforward way, the Picasso exhibition provided a chronological survey of his work. His decisiveness and powers of concentration and observation shone out from his childhood drawing of a dog through to the confident sweep of brush and ink of his large, late drawings.