Exhibitions
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
Inside stories
Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over…
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
Running on empty
Steve McQueen’s ‘Static’ (2009) impresses through its sheer directness — and it’s very far from static. A succession of helicopter-tracking…
Wigging out
British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still,…
Women of the cloth
My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she…
Winging it
‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings…
Paper, paper everywhere
Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them —……
