Painting
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…
Spirited away
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
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…
Go figure
An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium…
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…
Gnarly men and pretty boys
If you study History of Art, people generally assume you’re a nice, conscientious, plummy-voiced girl. Sometimes, people are right. It…
Small wonder
John Constable’s paintings of a tiny corner of rural Suffolk teach us to see the beauty on our doorstep, says Martin Gayford
Human soup
The earliest depictions of the Americas were eye-popping, and shaped European art, says Laura Gascoigne
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
On the contrary
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’
Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about life in the Norman countryside under quarantine, how the iPad is better than paint and brush, and why he is not a communist
‘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
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
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
What a scorcher
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th…
Wigging out
British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still,…
Warts and all
Jan van Eyck changed the art of picture-making more fundamentally than anyone who has ever lived, says Martin Gayford
Things that go bump
Pregnancy has always been a public spectacle – and as the Foundling Museum’s new exhibition shows, a dangerous one
Why did David Bomberg disappear?
David Bomberg was only 23 when his first solo exhibition opened in July 1914 at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea.…
Martin Gayford visits the greatest one-artist show on Earth
For a good deal of this autumn, I was living in Venice. This wasn’t exactly a holiday, I’d like to…
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
