Art history
The cormorant – symbol of gluttony and the Devil
Gordon McCullan explores the representation in art and literature over the centuries of a much maligned bird
Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning
Born in Illinois in 1910 in the middle of a hurricane, the experimental Surrealist became the model of the fiercely independent artist
The dilemmas and difficulties of artists through the ages
In his analysis of 20 masterpieces from prehistory to the present, Lachlan Goudie proves a born guide to the creative process
Goddesses and courtesans: six centuries of the female body in art
Amy Dempsey explains how nude representations, from Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ to Manet’s ‘Olympia’, express both emotion and the attitudes of the day
A feast for quiz-lovers: Christmas gift books
Delightful oddities include: foreign equivalents of ‘Joe Bloggs’; alternatives to the word ‘Hello’; and El Greco’s offer to repaint the Sistine Chapel
Are Vermeer’s paintings really coded religious messages?
‘View of Delft’ is not just a representation of some buildings seen across a stretch of dullish water but a vision of the celestial city, argues Andrew Graham-Dixon
Save art history!
A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones. Kenneth…
Art and moralising don’t mix
Somewhat late in the day, Rosanna McLaughlin condemns the way art is now obliged to communicate clear and approvable messages, resulting in timid, defensive, rule-bound works
Anselm Kiefer’s monstrous regiment of women
Women are found everywhere in Kieferland – martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, haunting, teasing and unknowable
The love that conquered every barrier – including the Iron Curtain
Iain Pears tells the dramatic story of how two art historians – one English, one Russian – met by chance in Venice and found they couldn’t live without each other
‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts
Bourgeois homes in the early 19th century became ‘virtual museums of death’, with models of heroes jostling replicas of the hands and feet of lost loved ones
Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali
Countless people apparently found her fascinating, but apart from being shrewd, scary, intelligent and very beady about money, it’s hard to see why
A picture of jealous rivalry: Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock, reviewed
Henri Matisse’s wife and longstanding model was understandably enraged when the artist, in later life, preferred his much younger Russian mistress as a sitter
The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise
The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage
An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal
Her imaginative, edgy sketches, though lacking technical expertise, often look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era
Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials
Martin Gayford finds artists from Rembrandt to De Kooning mixing pigment, egg and oil together with all the skill of an accomplished chef
Observing nature observed: the art of Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich’s scenes may appear to depict nature unbound, but they are also famous for their Rückenfiguren in the foreground, the men and women with their backs to us, facing what we also see
Portrait of the artist and mother
Even the best-known female Impressionists, such as Morisot and Cassatt, were seen as mothers first and artists second – a view Hettie Judah sets out to reverse
Jam-packed with treasures: the eccentric Sir John Soane’s Museum
The delightfully higgledy-piggledy display of antiquities, filling walls from floor to ceiling, may have been inspired by the Piranesi prints Soane also collected
‘There are an awful lot of my paintings I don’t like’, admitted Francis Bacon
While waspishly dismissive of many of the 20th century’s greatest artists, Bacon was also critical of his own work, in conversation with David Sylvester
The golden age of Dutch art never ceases to amaze
Benjamin Moser reminds us of how freely painters borrowed each other’s subjects – and of how many of the greatest, including Rembrandt, died in poverty
A true Renaissance man
Albrecht Dürer was an undoubted genius – and no one was more conscious of it than the artist himself, says Philip Hoare
Weird and bold
Laura Elkin looks at women artists from the past century onwards who boldly portray the female body from their own intimate experience
Evil geniuses
Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer
Firmly in the picture
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…
