Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer: the many faces of Walter Sickert
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
Evocative tribute to the orphaned caped crusader: Superheroes, Orphans & Origins at the Foundling Museum reviewed
Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen…
Exquisite and deranged: two glass exhibitions reviewed
A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window…
Raphael – saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
Fails to dispel the biggest myth of all: Whitechapel Gallery's A Century of the Artist’s Studio reviewed
Picture the artist’s studio: if what comes to mind is the romantic image of a male painter at his easel…
Part-gothic horror, part-Acorn Antiques: Louise Bourgeois, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed
Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…
The fascination of house fronts: Where We Live at Millennium Gallery reviewed
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Ethereal and allusive, all nuance and no schmaltz: Helen Frankenthaler, at Dulwich Gallery, reviewed
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
Brought to book
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…
How crazy was Louis Wain?
Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s…
The frisky side of a classical master: National Gallery's Poussin and the Dance reviewed
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
The genius of Frans Hals
Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…
The art of the pillbox
Laura Gascoigne on the art of pillboxes
The magical art of boxer, labourer & sometime gravedigger Eric Tucker
Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…
Covid has been great for drawing
Amid the greatly exaggerated reports of the death of painting issued and reissued over the course of the past century,…
How has this complete original been sidelined?
A party of disorderly couples has gatecrashed the Picture Gallery at Bath’s Holburne Museum, climbing on to the antique furniture,…
Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?
I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington.…
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai are extraordinary
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
Meet the woman who designed Britain's revolutionary road signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
A high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious: Colnaghi’s Dreamsongs reviewed
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
The mediums who pioneered abstract art
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Imagine being married to Stanley Spencer
It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition…
Figurative painting is back – but how good is any of it?
An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium…
The artistic response to the pandemic has so far been mind-numbingly banal
Travelling around Latin America three years ago, Stephen Chambers was attracted by pharmacy signs with pictograms advertising treatments to illiterate…
I wish John Chamberlain was still around to crush this hideous toothpaste-blue Ferrari
For three months art lovers have had nothing but screens to look at. As one New York dealer complained to…
