Exhibitions
Stanley and his women
It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition…
Sold down the river
The roots of the Southbank Centre’s current crisis stretch back to before the pandemic, says Oliver Basciano
…and of looking at real pictures again
One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1888 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went for a walk. They headed…
Grubby thumb prints and peeling glue
Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…
Go figure
An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium…
Selves examined
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
Going underground
Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the new cultural rebels
Age of stuckism
I’m in Mayfair and I’m boarding an airplane. Or rather, I’m boarding an approximation of an airplane. In the centre…
Hello, boys
‘Naughty little nudes,’ my history of art teacher used to say of Cranach’s Eves and Venuses. Aren’t they just? Coquettish…
Candid camera
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’
The life of Artemisia Gentileschi is made for Netflix, says Laura Freeman, but it’s her art that really excites
Great Scot
William Cook talks to Billy Connolly – welder, banjo player, comedian, actor, and now artist – about growing up in Glasgow, ditching the mike stand and living with Parkinson’s
Museums of the mind
Six months ago I published a book about travelling to look at works of art. One such journey involved a…
Red or dead
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
Strokes of genius
Martin Gayford
Earthly powers
Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker
Inside stories
Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over…
Naughty boy
In seven short years, Aubrey Beardsley mastered the art of outrage. Laura Gascoigne on the gloriously indecent illustrations of a singular genius
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
Wigging out
British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still,…
Warts and all
Jan van Eyck changed the art of picture-making more fundamentally than anyone who has ever lived, says Martin Gayford
Women of the cloth
My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she…
Things that go bump
Pregnancy has always been a public spectacle – and as the Foundling Museum’s new exhibition shows, a dangerous one
Enchanting – but don’t fall for the mummified rubber duck in the gift shop: Tutankhamun reviewed
Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return…
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
