Painting
The ordeal of sitting for my father Lucian Freud
Rose Boyt describes posing naked over many nights – supplied with purple hearts by Freud to keep her awake – and her shock on finally seeing the result
Is there still life in British still life?
‘The tyrannical rule of nature morte is, at last, over,’ announced Paul Nash in the Listener in 1931. ‘Apples have…
Beguiling: Yinka Shonibare, at the Serpentine Galleries, reviewed
More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because…
The latest Venice Biennale is ideologically and aesthetically bankrupt
Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much…
Impressionism is 150 years old – this is the anniversary show to see
The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition…
Why did this brilliant Irish artist fall off the radar?
Sir John Lavery has always had a place in Irish affections. His depiction of his wife, Hazel, as the mythical…
The force of nature that drove Claude Monet
A compulsion to paint en plein air would remain with the great Impressionist for life, as well as a questing need to find new ways to express what he saw and felt
How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters
Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine,…
Champion of the female sex
‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these…
Northern lights
Claudia Massie on the spectacular new galleries that showcase the best of Scottish art for the first time
The ruff stuff
Why is Frans Hals still not considered the equal of Rembrandt, asks Craig Raine
‘Moons are in!’
‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the…
Master of all trades
The busiest show in Edinburgh must be Grayson Perry: Smash Hits which, a month into its run, still has people…
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
Top cat
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
The great pretenders
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection…
The playful portraitist
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred…
Ladies first
In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the…
Away with all the flesh
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
Emancipation man
Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne
We get the picture
Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…
