Exhibitions
Shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites
Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
Home improvement
Squatting, gutting and retrofitting – and a lesson from India: Stuart Jeffries looks at the future of British architecture
Sex and corpses
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
Spirited away
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Culture club
In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…
Look at the paint!
The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves…
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…
