Exhibitions
Palpable and palpatable
Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with…
A frantic collector of views
‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The…
When Picasso met Lee Miller
During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue…
Factory setting
When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper…
We get the picture
Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…
Space oddities
‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the…
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
The dying of the light
Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents…
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
Wet wet wet
In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to…
One out of five
The point at which the heart sinks in this exhibition is, unfortunately, right at the outset. That’s where we meet…
Northern exposure
When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
Have we got news for you
In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s…
The lonely path to herohood
Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen…
Pot head
Richard Batterham died last September at the age of 85. He had worked in his pottery in the village of…
Blowing hot and cold
A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window…
Wings of desire
In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews,…
Around the world in 80 studios
Picture the artist’s studio: if what comes to mind is the romantic image of a male painter at his easel…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
Renaissance radical
‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in…
Mourning glory
The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…
Looking as haggling
Two markers: ‘Cottages at Auvers-sur-Oise’ (c.1873) is a sweet especial rural scene of faintly slovenly thatched cottages with, at its…
Gothic horror meets Acorn Antiques
Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…
