Exhibitions
When will the art world acknowledge this master?
Watercolours can be fatal for your standing in the art world. ‘As soon as you say you paint in watercolour,’…
Finally, a proper, grown-up retrospective from the Tate
A month ago in Hampstead, a work of art stopped me in my tracks. The piece was a vast rectangular…
The wonder of the Bayeux Tapestry
How the Froggies must be laughing. Such a gracious loan. So kind. Like England lending Henry V’s longbows to the…
Renoir was a master – let no one tell you otherwise
It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from…
The Victorian Hieronymus Bosch
No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of…
The art of resurrecting forgotten artists
A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to…
How Winston Churchill painted himself out of the darkness
At Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s home of 42 years, now owned by the National Trust, lies his painting studio. Reached…
The genius of Zurbaran – and why he vanished
A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent…
Tracey Emin at her most operatic
I feared this summing-up of Tracey Emin’s career might be self-congratulatory – biennale here, damehood there. But it’s Emin at…
A Tate show with dreamy, elusive power
One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now…
The truth about artists’ optical aids
The first thing you see on entering this major new Viennese exhibition is not one of Canaletto and his nephew…
The man who rescued the Notre-Dame
The Notre-Dame de Paris has had several close shaves down the years – even before the 2019 fire that nearly…
How sure are we that all the Michaelina Wautiers at the RA are by her?
Roll up, there’s a new old master in town. Or a new old mistress, if you prefer. Michaelina Wautier (1614-89)…
This Hockney show is disorientatingly enjoyable
When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorientating, at first, to encounter something as…
A Ramses show that has little to do with Ramses
Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold is, let’s not shy away from it, a profit-seeking exhibition mounted by an entertainment business.…
I miss post-internet art
I got my first paid writing gig back in the early 2010s, for an online magazine fixated on the then-current…
The art of ageing
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age…
Marvellous but repetitious: Gwen John – Strange Beauties reviewed
A pilgrimage to Cardiff Central, sorry, Caerdydd Canolog (according to the signage in the station, which also had my return…
Dazzling: Hawaii, at the British Museum, reviewed
Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the…
Cadavers will always captivate. Museums need to chill out
Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been…
Constable, not Turner, changed the course of painting
Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most…
The thrill of Stanley Spencer
‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer.…
A Spectator poll: What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
Slavoj Zizek Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from…
This exhibition made my companion gasp
Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though…
The Two Roberts drank, danced, fought – but how good was their art?
The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in…
