Exhibitions
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…
Face time
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Everywhere and nowhere
The second most interesting thing about this digital exhibition is that it is not for art critics like me. I…
An artist of the floating world
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
Eternity in an hour
Growing up on a farm outside Lima, I was aware that indigenous Peruvians did not understand time in the same…
Foreign parts
There are, perhaps, two types of exhibition visitor. Those who read the texts on the walls and those who don’t.…
Wild at heart
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
Small but perfectly formed
Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…
Painting everywhere
There’s a faint scent of desperation wafting through the Frieze tent this year. Pre–pandemic, this was where you came to…
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
Hals apoppin’
Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…
Flower power
Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our…
