Painting
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
Wet wet wet
In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to…
Northern exposure
When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
Old cud and fleshy frumps
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
High and mighty
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
Kindred spirits
‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
Low life
Catriona has a commission to paint the 17th-century façade of the chapel of St Joseph’s. She’d made a start when…
Renaissance radical
‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in…
Face time
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…
The art of the high street
Daisy Dunn on the painters who celebrate shop fronts
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Call of the wild
Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford
Bring me my Spear
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is…
An artist of the floating world
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
By Giorgio
Martin Gayford on a radical Nativity that is the subject of one of the great whodunnits of art history
Foreign parts
There are, perhaps, two types of exhibition visitor. Those who read the texts on the walls and those who don’t.…
Wild at heart
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
Modern master
Gossipy, amusing, a little vain, Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century Andy Warhol, says Martin Gayford
The art of listening
There’s a great documentary film on Netflix at the moment about the late artist Bob Ross, he of the happy…
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
Hals apoppin’
Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…
