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Martin Gayford refers to himself as a 'jobbing art critic'. That's a little self-deprecating for a writer who has experienced art and met (and sat for) artists all over the world. In this series he invites us to join him as he relives some of the more extraordinary journeys he has made in order to see art 'in the flesh'. These journeys take him (and sometimes also his long-suffering wife Josephine) to far-flung places - the island of Naoshima for example , a contemporary art lovers paradise that sits in Japan's inland sea . Sometimes the frustrations of Martin's journeys are man-made - the impossible timetable of opening hours in Italian museums, loss of guide books, wrongheaded routes over mountain passes and miscalculations of weather, timings, customs and personal resilience.

Nevertheless Martin's efforts a repaid with some exceptional encounters - not only in Japan but in wild Romania where he searches out Brancusi's 'endless column, in the Marche in Italy where he's on the trail of the most secluded paintings by Lorenzo Lotto, in Iceland where he's invited by Ronni Horn to a Library of Water and in the south of France where he encounters Anselm Kiefer in his vast estate littered with concrete towers, lead planes and ships and dismal dungeons of artwork.