The stark, frugal world of Piet Mondrian
In September 1940 the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, a refugee from war and the London…
Tales with a twist: Safe Enough and Other Stories, by Lee Child, reviewed
Child has fun with the short story form, shooting from the hip. Sometimes the bad get their comeuppance, sometimes they don’t – but the good are rarely rewarded or even recognised
The force of nature that drove Claude Monet
A compulsion to paint en plein air would remain with the great Impressionist for life, as well as a questing need to find new ways to express what he saw and felt
Jim Ede and the glories of Kettle’s Yard
Honor Clerk celebrates Jim Ede and his matchless collection at Kettle’s Yard
Heavenly beauty: Doppelmayr’s Atlas Coelestis
It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that…
You’d never guess from her art how passionate Gwen John was
‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an…
Pink for boys, blue for girls and a worldwide mania for mauve
Honor Clerk explores the history of the world through colour, from the Stone Age to orbiting the Moon
From light into darkness: the genius of Goya
The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was…
How long is long enough to look at a work of art?
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…
The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world
You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his…
Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…
Picturing paradise: the healing power of art
Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’…
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…
How any mother — or baby — survived childbirth before the 20th century is astonishing
Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was…
A feast for foot fetishists
It is always interesting to see what art historians get up to when none of the rest of us is…
Pathos and humanity in pictures of abject misery
In 1971 the late Linda Nochlin burst onto the public scene with her groundbreaking essay, ‘Why Have There Been No…
The subtle magic of Antony Gormley wraps the world
Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron.…
August Auguste
In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…
The art critic who loved to provoke the Establishment
Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George…
Let there be light
There has been extraordinarily little bright sunlight in the far northwest corner of Britain over the past year. Damp, drizzling…
Sexy selfies through the ages
At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is…
Velázquez’s vanishing act
This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct…
Rory McEwen: man of many talents — and among the greatest of all flower painters
It seems odd that a singer, musician, television performer and sculptor who typified the 1960s as vividly as Rory McEwen…
The self-taught maritime artist who transcends ‘naïve’ cliché
In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as…
The hidden history of one of the greatest treasures of the early Renaissance: Florence’s Brancacci chapel
In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for…
