Exhibitions
Absorbingly repellent: Ed Atkins, at Tate Britain, reviewed
In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you…
Wonderfully intimate: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, at the RA, reviewed
You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he…
If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone please tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?
Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose…
The art of sexual innuendo
Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure…
A blast: Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern, reviewed
Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and…
The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things
Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings…
An exhilarating, uneven survey of an outstandingly eccentric British surrealist
Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a…
The art of war
On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have…
The rediscovery of the art of Simone de Beauvoir’s sister
An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery…
The brilliance of Cicely Mary Barker
When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief…
A dreamy, if overly ambitious show: Silk Roads, at the British Museum, reviewed
Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among…
Tirzah Garwood just isn’t as good as her husband Eric Ravilious
Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this…
Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns and Tinguely all started out as window dressers
Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance…
Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed
Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another?…
We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong
You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they…
Sad but beautiful exhibition of Afghanistan’s war rugs
Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah…
At Japan House humanity has arrived at the perfect future: food for ogling, not eating
There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with…
Fog, tea and full English breakfasts: Monet and London, at the Courtauld, reviewed
For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by…
What has become of the Wellcome Collection?
In 2022 the Wellcome Collection caused a stir by closing its Medicine Man exhibition on the grounds that it was…
The art inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics was a very mixed bag
George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball…
Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert…
Why has Leonora Carrington still not had a big exhibition?
‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora…
The importance of copying
The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists:…
Porcelain-painting during the French revolution
People don’t accumulate stuff any more. When the late Victorian houses on our street change hands their interiors are stripped…
This British surrealist is a revelation
When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of…
