Painting
The great image-maker
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Great Scottie
On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog…
Pete the Street
‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete…
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan
The Regent Canaletto
Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…
From colander to bed of nails
I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington.…
Missing the big picture
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
The bimbofication of art
Galleries are awash with gimmicky paintings that look like they’ve been designed by algorithm. Dean Kissick on the rise of zombie figuration
Raw Bacon
Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max…
Whodunnit?
The Master of Flémalle was one of the first painters to depict in detail the reality of ordinary things. But who was he? Martin Gayford finds a prime suspect
Painting vs sculpture
In an extract from their book, Antony Gormley tells Martin Gayford that the 3-D will always trump the 2-D
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
