visual art
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…
The great pretenders
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
Happy ending
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Close encounters
A story John Piper liked to tell — and the one most told about him — is of a morning…
Surreal, strange and scatological
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Old masters
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
Topsy-turvy
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it…
Whodunnit?
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
‘So quick and chancy’
When asked the question ‘What is art?’, Andy Warhol gave a characteristically flip answer (‘Isn’t that a guy’s name?’). On…
Magnetic north
The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie
Show me the Monet
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…
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…
Hanging offence
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…
Now you see it, now you don’t
The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it…
Indiscreet astronaut
Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was…
Melting pot
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
Bursting the bubble
The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For…
Lines of beauty
Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly…
