Exhibitions
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,…
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…
