Tate modern
Picasso’s ravishing work for the ballet
Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new storehouse in Stratford’s Olympic Park are being enthralled by an atmospherically lit…
A blast: Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern, reviewed
Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and…
How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters
Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine,…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
The artist’s artist
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
Palpable and palpatable
Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with…
The changing face of art
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…
We get the picture
Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…
Time and motion study
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
The eyes have it
Stuart Jeffries on the tyranny of the visual
Doyenne of applied arts
Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and…
The art of selling vaccines
I was bemused when I first saw the photograph of spaced-out chairs and vaccination booths in the Turbine Hall of the…
Touchy feely
Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined…
‘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
Poetry in motion
How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we…
All together now
It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks…
Rooms with a view
Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing…
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…
![English National Opera's triumphant new production of Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Daniel Kramer. [Photo: Alistair Muir]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Opera_Exhibitions.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed
ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in…
You’ll be blubbing over a wooden boulder at David Nash’s show at Towner Art Gallery
Call me soppy, but when the credits rolled on ‘Wooden Boulder’, a film made by earth artist David Nash over…
Olafur Eliasson’s art is both futuristic and completely traditional – which is why I love it
Superficially, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern can seem like a theme park. To enter many of the exhibits,…
Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
There is a jewel of a painting at Gagosian’s Francis Bacon show
‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is…
Powerful elegy for a world that is slipping away: Tate Britain’s The Asset Strippers reviewed
There was a moment more than 20 years ago when Bankside Power Station was derelict but its transformation into Tate…
Wicked, humorous and high-spirited: Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern reviewed
Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s…
