Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
Space odyssey
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
Silent films
On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the…
Snap, crackle and op
Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…
What lies beneath
Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it…
Object lesson
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
Animal magnetism
Picasso had a thing for bulls. Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer. Sir John Richardson about a lifelong obsession
Face time
As a chat-up line it was at least unusual. On 8 January 1927, a 46-year-old man approached a young woman…
The treasures of Alexandria revealed: British Museum’s Sunken cities reviewed
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
As he approaches 80, the German master Georg Baselitz contemplates the end
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
This Parisian exhibition has rewritten the story of art
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
How a Liberal MP's inability to draw led him to invent photography
William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for…
Norman Sicily was a multicultural paradise – but it didn’t last long
A few weeks ago, I looked out on the Cathedral of Monreale from the platform on which once stood the…
Botticelli’s jokes and the quarrelsome, creative spirit of Florence
Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms.…
Ancient Egypt’s obsession with death was in fact a preoccupation with life
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
A lot of art is trickery - and all the better for it
One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street…
RA’s Giorgione show is so rich it’s worth returning to several times
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Is this female Swedish painter a major rediscovery - or a minor footnote?
In 1896, a group of five young Swedish women artists began to meet regularly in order to access mystical zones…
Hell made fun – the joy of Hieronymus Bosch
The 20th-century painter who called himself Balthus once proposed that a monograph about him should begin with the words ‘Balthus…
Renaissance master? Rascal? Thief? In search of Giorgione
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was…
Warhol the traditionalist: the Ashmolean Museum show reviewed
When asked the question ‘What is art?’, Andy Warhol gave a characteristically flip answer (‘Isn’t that a guy’s name?’). On…
The link between herbaceous borders and the avant-garde
Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him…
Eugene Delacroix foresaw the future of society not just art
At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the…
Cool, beguiling, Duchampian set of still lives from Michael Craig-Martin at the Serpentine Gallery
Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously…
A short history of statue-toppling
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche…
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