Painting
Viewing the view
It’s not all picnics and cowslips. You need sense as well as sensibility to appreciate a landscape, says Mary Keen
Internal affairs
The ten vignettes that punctuate the white walls of the Ingleby Gallery invite us to step into the many-chambered mind…
Whodunnit?
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
Magnetic north
The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie
Wild at heart
Delacroix’s frigid self-control concealed an emotional volcano. Martin Gayford explores the paradoxes that define the apostle of modernism
Disciple of Duchamp
Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously…
Eurovision
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?
Martin Gayford investigates how this splendid Tahitian Madonna came about and why religion was ever-present in Gauguin's art
In a class of their own
Painters and sculptors are highly averse to being labelled. So much so that it seems fairly certain that, if asked,…
Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial…
Approachable abstraction
Fifteen million pounds and a hefty slice of architectural vision have transformed the Whitworth from a fusty Victorian art temple…
Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a…
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…
Now you see it, now you don’t
The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it…
Indiscreet astronaut
Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was…
The bitterness of Bacon
When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established,…
Touchy-feely – not
‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of…
Life after death
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
Portrait or landscape?
One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a…
Fairground attraction
Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble.…
The Craig-Martin touch
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
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…
‘Paint goes on living’
Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt, Twombly and the power of art
Diary
Andrew Marr 22 August 2015 9:00 am
This is the Corbyn summer. From the perspective of a short holiday, my overwhelming feeling is one of despair at…