Exhibitions
Gothic horror meets Acorn Antiques
Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…
Everything under the sun
Christopher Howse is bowled over by the astonishingartefacts in the British Museum’s Stonehenge exhibition
Face time
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…
The art of the high street
Daisy Dunn on the painters who celebrate shop fronts
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Call of the wild
Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford
An artist of the floating world
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
Eternity in an hour
Growing up on a farm outside Lima, I was aware that indigenous Peruvians did not understand time in the same…
Foreign parts
There are, perhaps, two types of exhibition visitor. Those who read the texts on the walls and those who don’t.…
Wild at heart
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
Putting on the glitz
From quartz to quince: Daisy Dunn on the art and science of Fabergé
An honorary Frenchman
When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…
The eyes have it
Stuart Jeffries on the tyranny of the visual
Beano rules
Stuart Jeffries on the cultural influence of the comic that said it was good to be bad
Hals apoppin’
Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…
Flower power
Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our…
Incredible hulks
Laura Gascoigne on the art of pillboxes
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…
Wildness and wit
Heads turn, strangers gawp, matrons tut or look in envy. A man doffs his bowler hat knowing when he is…
Grandeur and subtlety
The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the…
North star
Claudia Massie on the unjustly neglected artist Joan Eardley, who deserves to be ranked alongside Auerbach, Bacon and de Kooning
One of life’s irregulars
Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…
Bohemian rhapsody
Rosie Millard is transported to the Impasse Ronsin, a tiny, squalid cul de sac in Paris’s 15th arrondissement that was once the centre of the modern-art world
Queen of Bohemia
Nina Hamnett’s art has long been overshadowed by her wild, hedonistic life, but that is changing, says Hermione Eyre — and about time
When two become one
‘When pictures painted as companions are separated,’ John Constable wisely observed, ‘the purchaser of one, without being aware of it,…
