visual art
Cut-ups, hallucinations and Hermann Goering: the extraordinary life of Brion Gysin
Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was…
The British Museum's Celtic masterpieces aren't Celtic - but they are fabulous
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern - our critic goes zzzzz
The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For…
How silverpoint revolutionised art
Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly…
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
I can’t stop thinking about the Courtauld’s Unfinished exhibition
A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d…
Richard Long interview: ‘I was always an artist, even when I was two years old’
William Cook explores the elemental art and Olympian walks of Richard Long
The forgotten Swiss portraitist and his extraordinary pastels: Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Scottish National Gallery reviewed
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
Why is the garden absent in English painting?
One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a…
Whole worlds are conjured up in a few strokes: Watercolour at the Fitzwilliam Museum reviewed
I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad…
The artist who only turned into a major painter once he became a homicidal maniac
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
John Waters interview: ‘We can’t make fun of Bruce Jenner?’
No one does transgression like the filmmaker John Waters. Jasper Rees talks to him about political correctness, post-ops and pubes
Forget Vienna - Britain now has its own chamber of curiosities at the British Museum
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made.…
Poetic or pretentious? Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy reviewed
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
As blatant rip-offs go, this one is shaping up nicely: Odyssey, BBC2, reviewed
This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…
![‘Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) [6]’, 1943, by Barbara Hepworth](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2015/06/exhibitions1.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=273)
Was Barbara Hepworth a giant of modern sculpture - or a dreary relic of post-war Britain?
In the last two decades of her life, Barbara Hepworth was a big figure in the world of art. A…
The artist who turned the Hayward Gallery into Disney World
Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble.…
James Turrell interview: ‘I sell blue sky and coloured air’
Martin Gayford talks to the artist James Turrell, who has lit up Houghton Hall like a baroque firework display
Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition reviewed: a jumble sale with pizzazz
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
Welcome to Japan’s best kept cultural secret: an art island with an underground museum
In his introductory remarks to the Afro–Eurasian Eclipse, one of his later suites for jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington remarked —…
Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum is very good news - for the Met
About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made…
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at Kettle's Yard reviewed: 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…
Luxury isn’t the opposite of poverty but the opposite of vulgarity - but don’t tell the V&A
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery reviewed: a mixed bag of sometimes magnificent paintings
When it was suggested that a huge exhibition of Impressionist paintings should be held in London, Claude Monet had his…
