Exhibitions
Stars in their eyes
‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared…
Melting pot
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
Bursting the bubble
The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For…
Lines of beauty
Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly…
Touchy-feely – not
‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of…
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
French connection
Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and technique, mutable in appearance —…
Seeking closure
A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d…
Life after death
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
Watery depths
I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad…
Portrait of the artist as a madman
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
Scholarship and folly
It has often been related how, towards the end of his long life, a critical barb got under J.M.W. Turner’s…
Curiouser and curiouser
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made.…
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
![‘Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) [6]’, 1943, by Barbara Hepworth](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/exhibitions1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Shape-shifter
In the last two decades of her life, Barbara Hepworth was a big figure in the world of art. A…
Fairground attraction
Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble.…
The Craig-Martin touch
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
This is England
At the Turner Prize dinner of 2003, as the winner, Grayson Perry, took a photo call with his family wearing…
Tribes of one
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of…
He’s got rhythm
One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk…
Designer fatigue
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
Sonia alone
In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a…
Light fantastic
The most unusual picture in the exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery, in terms of subject-matter…
Making faces
The history of portraiture is festooned with images of sitters overwhelmed by dress, setting and the accoutrements of worldly success.…
American beauty
It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal…
