Arts
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
Bradford bohemian
David Hockney talks to Martin Gayford about 60 years of ignoring art fashion
In the shadow of Guernica
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Sale of the century
Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27…
There’s something about Mary
A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman
Tales from a strip joint
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…
On the Wayne
The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s,…
Still life
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Culture Buff
Andy Warhol is the star but Roy Lichtenstein is the master. That’s the quick take out of POP TO POPISM…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Mademoiselle Non
On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives
Warts and all
Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued,…
Un-Beaton
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
Slow burn
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a…
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
In the closet
The Imitation Game is a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who broke the German’s Enigma…
Don’t look now
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as…
India’s sacrifice
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British…
On war and remembrance
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
