Painting
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…
The forgotten masterpieces of Indian art
As late as the end of the 18th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever seen the legendary Mughal…
To fill a major Tate show requires a huge talent. Dora Maar didn’t have that
Dora Maar first attracted the attention of Pablo Picasso while playing a rather dangerous game at the celebrated left-bank café…
The pleasures and perils of talking about art on the radio
‘I like not knowing why I like it,’ declared Fiona Shaw, the actress, about Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary blast of colour,…
Remarkable and imaginative: Fitzwilliam Museum’s The Art of Food reviewed
Eating makes us anxious. This is a feature of contemporary life: a huge amount of attention is devoted to how…
Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…
The beauties of the universe are revealed in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch
In the early 1660s, Pieter de Hooch was living in an area of what we would now call urban overspill…
Pilferer, paedophile and true great: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery reviewed
On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile…
The rare gifts of Peter Doig
‘My basic intention,’ the late Patrick Caulfield once told me, ‘is to create some attractive place to be, maybe even…
Why has figurative painting become fashionable again?
The figure is back. Faces stare, bodies sprawl, fingers swipe, mums clutch, hands loll. The Venice Biennale was full of…
Why did Mrs Lowry hate her son’s paintings?
‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you…
Whooshing seedlings and squabbling stems: Ivon Hitchens at Pallant House reviewed
Set down the secateurs, silence the strimmers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. Ivon Hitchens was a…
Where are the art fans in Edinburgh? Getting their eyes frazzled by Bridget Riley
The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected…
