Arts feature
You’ve been framed
The photographer Martin Parr claims to like ordinary people, but are his pictures celebratory or mocking, asks Stephen Bayley
You’ve been framed
‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at…
Brothers grim
What is a serious film festival doing opening with Ethan and Joel Coens’ turkey Hail, Caesar!? James Woodall reports from Berlin
Brothers grim
One of the more obscure winners in recent years of the Berlin film festival’s Golden Bear was a version of…
Whodunnit?
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
Whodunnit?
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was…
Public offence
Bad public art pollutes our townscapes. Stephen Bayley names and shames the worst offenders as he unveils the winner of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award
Public offence
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3 There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers…
Magnetic north
The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie
Magnetic north
‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does…
Wild at heart
Delacroix’s frigid self-control concealed an emotional volcano. Martin Gayford explores the paradoxes that define the apostle of modernism
Pornographer-in-Chief
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
Wild at heart
At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the…
Pornographer-in-Chief
Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in…
Away with the angels?
John Dee liked to talk to spirits but he was no loony witch, says Christopher Howse
Away with the angels?
I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first…
Moving statues
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
Moving statues
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche…
Best in show
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
Best in show
Until a decade and a half ago, we had no national museum of modern art at all. Indeed, the stuff…
Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?
Martin Gayford investigates how this splendid Tahitian Madonna came about and why religion was ever-present in Gauguin's art
The art of Beatrix Potter
Her best illustrations — limpid, ethereal, carefully observed — are masterly works of art in their own right, argues Matthew Dennison
The art of Beatrix Potter
‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code.…
Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?
A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth,…
New word order
Peter Robins reports from Nottingham on a unique adaptation of a novel by the literary innovator B.S. Johnson
