Exhibitions
Why did Goya’s sitters put up with his brutal honesty?
Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the…
Edmund de Waal’s diary: Selling nothing, and why writers need ping-pong
On the top landing of the Royal Academy is the Sackler Sculpture Corridor, a long stony shelf of torsos of…
Melting pot
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
Lines of beauty
Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly…
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
The Long view
William Cook explores the elemental art and Olympian walks of Richard Long
Life after death
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
Watery depths
I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad…
Portrait of the artist as a madman
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
Curiouser and curiouser
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made.…
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
Fairground attraction
Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble.…
Seeing the light
Martin Gayford talks to the artist James Turrell, who has lit up Houghton Hall like a baroque firework display
The Craig-Martin touch
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
More Marx than Dante
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Tribes of one
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of…
He’s got rhythm
One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk…
Designer fatigue
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
‘Paint goes on living’
Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt, Twombly and the power of art
Sonia alone
In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a…
Light fantastic
The most unusual picture in the exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery, in terms of subject-matter…
Survivors
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
Making faces
The history of portraiture is festooned with images of sitters overwhelmed by dress, setting and the accoutrements of worldly success.…
American beauty
It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal…
State of the arts
The season of cringe-making acceptance speeches at arts awards ceremonies is nearly over, thank heavens. But it hasn’t passed without…
