Picasso
It is not the masterpieces that were lost, but the collectors, Natalya Semenova rights a wrong
It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been…
Peak Picasso: how the half-man half-monster reached his creative – and carnal – zenith
By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio…
What does ‘Guernica’ really symbolise?
It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura…
The most impressive array of work to be seen in London in years: Cézanne’s Portraits reviewed
The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful…
Princess Uppity
Princess Margaret was everywhere on the bohemian scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She hung out with all the famous…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
Surreal, strange and scatological
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
The painter as poser
Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was…
Ménage à trois
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
The man who made abstract art fly
One day, in October 1930, Alexander Calder visited the great abstract painter Piet Mondrian in his apartment in Paris. The…
High life
If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk out the joint in Amsterdam…
Portrait of the week
Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while…
The frog prince
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
Tribes of one
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of…
Sonia alone
In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a…
Diary
So far, what an infuriating election campaign. We have the most extraordinary array of digital, paper and broadcasting media at…
Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
In the shadow of Guernica
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
In the gutter, looking at the stars
What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds…
A bad lot
Quite a few of the former president Yanukovych’s ‘treasures’ seem to carry tags from London auctioneers
Scratching the surface
It is often said of John Craxton (1922–2009) that he knew how to live well and considered this more important…
All the fun of the fair
The Works on Paper annual fair runs from 6 to 9 February at the Science Museum. Its name is a…
