visual art

The artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise

24 April 2021 9:00 am

Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise

It's almost touching that the NFT world see itself as radical

17 April 2021 9:00 am

Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated…

Can VR help to sell art to kids?

10 April 2021 9:00 am

Some pictures are now so mediated that their actual physicality has long been dwarfed by a million reproductions. The ‘Mona…

How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals

6 March 2021 9:00 am

Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…

The Sistine Chapel as you've never seen it before

27 February 2021 9:00 am

Rosie Millard gets her gloved hands on one of the world’s most lavish – and expensive – art books

Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?

20 February 2021 9:00 am

I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington.…

These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai are extraordinary

13 February 2021 9:00 am

These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne

Maggi Hambling's Wollstonecraft statue is hideous but fitting

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky.…

Antony Gormley on why sculpture is far superior to painting

7 November 2020 9:00 am

In an extract from their book, Antony Gormley tells Martin Gayford that the 3-D will always trump the 2-D

The mediums who pioneered abstract art

26 September 2020 9:00 am

The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne

Looking at Barnett Freedman makes me weep at the government's dismal graphics

15 August 2020 9:00 am

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…

Privatisation is the best option for the South Bank Centre

6 June 2020 9:00 am

I must have written about this subject 100 times in 30 years and I’m still having to restate the bloody…

‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’: David Hockney interviewed

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

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

How to succeed in sculpture (without being a man)

18 April 2020 9:00 am

Whee-ooh-whee ya-ya-yang skrittle-skrittle skreeeek… Is it a space pod bearing aliens from Mars? No, it’s a podcast featuring aliens from…

Wooden head from southern Nigeria, collected by Northcote W. Thomas in 1910

Lucian Freud insisted a forgery could be as great as the real thing. Was he right?

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent,…

Like walking into a Rothko: ‘Din blinde passager’ (‘Your blind passenger’), 2010, by Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson’s art is both futuristic and completely traditional – which is why I love it

27 July 2019 9:00 am

Superficially, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern can seem like a theme park. To enter many of the exhibits,…

‘Telepainting’, 1964, by Takis

Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed

13 July 2019 9:00 am

Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…

The eyes have it: ‘The Zebra’, 1763, by George Stubbs

What makes British art British?

27 April 2019 9:00 am

There’s no avoiding the Britishness of British art. It hits me every time I walk outside and see dappled trees…

Art or propaganda? Wolfgang Tillmans’ pro-EU poster for the 2016 referendum

For many artists being propagandists has become their raison d’être

9 March 2019 9:00 am

If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving…

A document of a mass human experiment that is moving, revolting, violent and extraordinarily pornographic

Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…

‘Tristan’s Ascension’, 2005, by Bill Viola

The odd couple: Bill Viola / Michelangelo at the RA reviewed

2 February 2019 9:00 am

The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable…

‘The Artist with his Wife Margaret and Eldest Daughter Mary’, c.1748, by Thomas Gainsborough

It’s hard to think of finer images of children than Gainsborough’s

12 January 2019 9:00 am

When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it…

The ‘soul canoe’ from New Guinea is a sculpture as powerful as any by Brancusi

Full of fabulous, but baffling, things: Oceania reviewed

13 October 2018 9:00 am

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As…

‘The Acrobat Schulz V’ (1921), by Albert Birkle

Caricature, satire and over-the-top horror: Magic Realism at Tate Modern reviewed

25 August 2018 9:00 am

‘It is disastrous to name ourselves!’ So Willem de Kooning responded when some of his New York painter buddies elected…

A kind of blue: Yves Klein’s ‘Jonathan Swift’ (c.1960) amid the Van Dycks and Joshua Reynolds

A visionary and playful heir to Duchamp: Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace

11 August 2018 9:00 am

Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph —…