Bridget Riley

The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s

5 July 2025 9:00 am

Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and…

Animal magic

4 December 2021 9:00 am

If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs…

Bright and beautiful

5 December 2020 9:00 am

When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ —…

Look at the paint!

19 September 2020 9:00 am

The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves…

‘Paean’ (1973) by Bridget Riley

Where are the art fans in Edinburgh? Getting their eyes frazzled by Bridget Riley

17 August 2019 9:00 am

The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected…

‘Portrait of a Lady (La Schiavona)’, c.1510-12, by Titian

The advantages of turning down the colour knob: Monochrome reviewed

4 November 2017 9:00 am

Leonardo da Vinci thought sculpting a messy business. The sculptor, he pointed out, has to bang away with a hammer,…

Moving pictures: ‘Achaean’, 1981, by Bridget Riley

Snap, crackle and op

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…

M.C. Escher: limited, repetitive, but he deserves a place in art history

7 November 2015 9:00 am

‘Surely,’ mused the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, ‘it is a bit absurd to draw a few lines and then claim:…

Coming out of the shadows

12 April 2014 9:00 am

Niru Ratnam highlights the revival of interest in artists who were popular in the 1960s and 1970s