Exhibitions
Animals, tourists and raptors: the hazards of being a plein-air artist
A conservator at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum was recently astonished to find a tiny grasshopper stuck in the paint of…
How Rodin made a Parthenon above Paris
‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues…
The artist more fond of flowers and vegetables than people – and who can blame him
I have occasionally mused that there is plenty of scope for a Tate East Anglia — a pendant on the…
Why it’s bad for potters to think of themselves as artists
A friend of mine once owned a vase by the potter Hans Coper — until, that is, her teenage son…
The public are quite right to love Monet
Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and…
From Stansted to corporate swank: superstructuralism has a lot to answer for
Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of…
The glorious history of Chatham Dockyard, as told through the eyes of artists
‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens…
The artist who creates digital life forms that bite & self-harm. Sam Leith meets him (and them)
Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries…
Surreal jokes and juicy strokes: Martin Gayford on the power of paint
René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but…
Peak Picasso: how the half-man half-monster reached his creative – and carnal – zenith
By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio…
Magnificent paintings – oddly curated: All Too Human reviewed
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art:…
The strangely unique vision of Leonard Rosoman
Leonard Rosoman is not a well-known artist these days. Many of us will, however, be subliminally familiar with his mural…
Edison decried the electric recording as a mere ‘volume fad’
Listen closely, among the shelves of the last remaining music shops, in student dorm rooms and amid the flat whites…
Are cruise liners the solution to the housing crisis?
Looking at the sketchbook of William Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-artist who joined a P&O liner after surviving the Anglo-Zulu War,…
Lemons and pebbles are as important to Kettle’s Yard as the art
When I first visited Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, I was shown around by Jim Ede, its founder and creator. This wasn’t…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy His colossal, panoramic pictures are brilliant and lowering at the same time
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed
Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of…
Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive
Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250…
What can we learn from Jeremy Bentham’s pickled head?
Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way…
The time is right for an Erté revival – a new hero for our gender-anxious times
Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
Is May Morris a feminist cause – a woman of genius unfairly overlooked?
You may think you don’t know May Morris, daughter of William, but you’ll probably have come across her wallpaper. Her…
The forgotten history of the Tube’s ‘poster girls’
Every weekday, I travel by Tube to The Spectator’s office, staring at the posters plastered all over the walls. I…