Exhibitions
The yin and yang of abstraction
In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World…
The hair and now
‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable…
Milking it
I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the…
Hounds of love
Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed,…
Dotty and daffy
Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part…
Art for art’s sake – and then some
It’s payback time: women, artists from ethnic minorities and non-western traditions are taking over the exhibition schedules. On the heels…
The bowl and the bottle
Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but…
Sea fever
In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for…
Haunted habitats
You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for…
Swimming against the tide
If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old…
On Finchleystrasse
Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3,…
Dynamo of the Florentine Renaissance
‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard…
The only way is Sussex
In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when…
A crash course in all things Hispanic
‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish…
Worlds gone mad
‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media…
Crocks of gold
There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of…
The stuff that dreams are made of
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
A painter of rural doings
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of…
Hair brained
It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really…
Seven women
The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in…
Privates on parade
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the…
Written in stone
‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’…
The artist’s artist
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
Away with all the flesh
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
A world apart
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
