visual art
The forgotten history of the Tube’s ‘poster girls’
Every weekday, I travel by Tube to The Spectator’s office, staring at the posters plastered all over the walls. I…
The old ways
I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…
It’s the thought that counts
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
The Bilbao effect
Twenty years ago I wrote of the otherwise slaveringly praised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: I’m in a minority of, apparently,…
Snap, crackle and op
Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…
Object lesson
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
As he approaches 80, the German master Georg Baselitz contemplates the end
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
The shimmering, restless, groovy fabrics of John Piper
A story John Piper liked to tell — and the one most told about him — is of a morning…
This Parisian exhibition has rewritten the story of art
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Ancient Egypt’s obsession with death was in fact a preoccupation with life
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
V&A's Botticelli Reimagined has too many desperate pretenders
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it…
Renaissance master? Rascal? Thief? In search of Giorgione
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
Warhol the traditionalist: the Ashmolean Museum show reviewed
When asked the question ‘What is art?’, Andy Warhol gave a characteristically flip answer (‘Isn’t that a guy’s name?’). On…
Nikolai Astrup - Norway’s other great painter
The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie
The link between herbaceous borders and the avant-garde
Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him…
The art of Beatrix Potter
Her best illustrations — limpid, ethereal, carefully observed — are masterly works of art in their own right, argues Matthew Dennison
Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial…
The work of Elisabeth Frink is ripe for a renaissance
In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures,…
Alexander Calder: 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…
Why I find women-only exhibitions depressing
Modern Scottish Men, a new exhibition celebrating the achievements of male artists in the 20th century, opens next month in…
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…
What is it about Bill Viola’s films that reduce grown-ups to tears?
What is it about Bill Viola's films that reduce grown-ups to tears? William Cook dries his eyes and talks to the video artist about Zen, loss and nearly drowning
Why did Goya’s sitters put up with his brutal honesty?
Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the…
On the frontiers of figuration, abstraction and total immateriality
The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it…
