Maximum wattage
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
A game for two
Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head. But portraiture is a game for two.…
A tale of two artists
Wherever one looked in the arts scene of the 1940s and ’50s, one was likely to encounter the tragicomic figure…
American quartet
Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether…
Tall story
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…
The better angels of our nature
Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics…
Dealer’s choice
One evening a few weeks ago I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition at the Venice…
Being and nothingness
Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art…
League of nations
‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…
Animal magnetism
‘I frequently went to bullfights with Picasso,’ Sir John Richardson remarked, quite casually, as he showed me around the exhibition…
Put a spell on you
Many of the mediums from which art is made have been around for a long time. People have been painting…
Constable on sea
John Constable was, as we say these days, conflicted about Brighton. On the one hand, as he wrote in a…
The good, the indifferent and the simply awful
‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a…
Cut it out
How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together…
Internal affairs
Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin…
The odd couple
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete…
Home help
There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others…
Home help
There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others…
Snap happy
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
Snap happy
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
American psyche
The latest exhibition at the Royal Academy is entitled America after the Fall. It deals with painting in the United…
American psyche
The latest exhibition at the Royal Academy is entitled America after the Fall. It deals with painting in the United…
The good, the bad and the ugly
Vladimir Putin notoriously declared the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be one of the greatest disasters of…
The good, the bad and the ugly
Vladimir Putin notoriously declared the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be one of the greatest disasters of…
Seeing everything in black and white
Two divergent approaches to printmaking are on view in an exhibition of graphic work by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud…
