Art history
Finders keepers
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
A 50-year infatuation
The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…
A narcissistic bore — portrait of the artist today
Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by…
Toujours la politesse
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Doubting Thomas
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
Culture and horticulture
Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens is a beautiful book. Lovers of early 20th-century British art will find it hard to stop…
A bold artistic vision
Sam Leith on the exasperating, charismatic painter who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee
The healing art
In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not…
Aesthete and huckster
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
Cubism domesticated
Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them —…
Images that glow in the mind
In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him…
Exposing the art mafia
‘S is for Spoof.’ There it is on page 86, a full-page reproduction of a Nat Tate drawing, sold at…
Divinely decadent
With an eye to the blasphemy underlying some of the loveliest Renaissance painting, Honor Clerk will be choosing her Christmas cards more carefully this year
Breaking omertà
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
Bloom and bust
‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could…
Conspicuous consumption
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
