Exhibitions
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
Fibre optics
Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited…
We’re off to see the wizard
At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
The great pretenders
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection…
The playful portraitist
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred…
Breaking the rules
Rules in art exist to be broken but it takes chutzpah, which could explain why so many rule-breakers in modern…
Cutting edge
There’s a nice irony to the title Salon Paintings when the salon in question is a barbershop, an irony that…
One hundred years of humiliation
By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries…
Shatterer of glass ceilings
Reviewing the Prado’s joint exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana in the Art Newspaper three years ago, Brian Allen…
Station to station
Exiting Peckham Rye station, you’re not aware of it, but standing on the platform you can see a mansard roof…
Top gear
Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh,…
Ladies first
In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the…
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…
