Exhibitions
One of life’s irregulars
Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…
Drawing breath
Amid the greatly exaggerated reports of the death of painting issued and reissued over the course of the past century,…
When two become one
‘When pictures painted as companions are separated,’ John Constable wisely observed, ‘the purchaser of one, without being aware of it,…
Touchy feely
Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined…
The two Popes
A party of disorderly couples has gatecrashed the Picture Gallery at Bath’s Holburne Museum, climbing on to the antique furniture,…
It’s in the bag
‘Of course, I am obstinate in defending our liberties and our law — that is why I carry a big…
Shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites
Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
Sex and corpses
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
Culture club
In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…
Look at the paint!
The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves…
Stanley and his women
It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition…
…and of looking at real pictures again
One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1888 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went for a walk. They headed…
Grubby thumb prints and peeling glue
Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…
Go figure
An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium…
The art of plague
Travelling around Latin America three years ago, Stephen Chambers was attracted by pharmacy signs with pictograms advertising treatments to illiterate…
Selves examined
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
Rooms with a view
Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing…
Creative destruction
For three months art lovers have had nothing but screens to look at. As one New York dealer complained to…
Age of stuckism
I’m in Mayfair and I’m boarding an airplane. Or rather, I’m boarding an approximation of an airplane. In the centre…
Hello, boys
‘Naughty little nudes,’ my history of art teacher used to say of Cranach’s Eves and Venuses. Aren’t they just? Coquettish…
‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’
The life of Artemisia Gentileschi is made for Netflix, says Laura Freeman, but it’s her art that really excites
Red or dead
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
Strokes of genius
Martin Gayford
