Contemporary art
Emotional rescue
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
Space odyssey
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
Nothing is quite what it seems
One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…
Happy ending
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
Seeing the light
Martin Gayford talks to the artist James Turrell, who has lit up Houghton Hall like a baroque firework display
Eastern reflections
In his introductory remarks to the Afro–Eurasian Eclipse, one of his later suites for jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington remarked —…
More Marx than Dante
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Home and away
An extraordinary black-and-white photograph of a young black boy taken on the Isle of Wight by Julia Margaret Cameron in…
Curators
As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…
The power of nightmares
It is not impossible to create good art that makes a political point, just highly unusual. Goya’s ‘Third of May’…
All dressed up – and skirting the subject
At the time it was all too easy to get sucked in by the hype. In 2013, Grayson Perry was…
