Sculpture
What lies beneath
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
The great pretenders
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
First Lady of Pop Art
In 1961 the Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol Escobar made a startling appearance at the New York artists’ group known as the…
Surreal, strange and scatological
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Paranormal activity
In 1896, a group of five young Swedish women artists began to meet regularly in order to access mystical zones…
Public offence
Bad public art pollutes our townscapes. Stephen Bayley names and shames the worst offenders as he unveils the winner of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award
Moving statues
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
Eurovision
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
Lost in space
In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures,…
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…
Of gods and men
Tom Holland on Egypt, where the deities were born and history itself began
Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a…
Touchy-feely – not
‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of…
Seeking closure
A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d…
Curiouser and curiouser
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made.…
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
![‘Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) [6]’, 1943, by Barbara Hepworth](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/exhibitions1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Shape-shifter
In the last two decades of her life, Barbara Hepworth was a big figure in the world of art. A…
The Craig-Martin touch
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
More Marx than Dante
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
He’s got rhythm
One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk…
Lime light
In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve…
Survivors
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
Public enemy
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
Easy does it
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
Texas: From cowboys to culture
Dallas has reinvented itself as a major arts destination, says Hugh Graham
