Martin Gayford

Surreal visions: the best of this year’s art books reviewed

25 November 2023 9:00 am

Subjects include Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, Leonora Carrington’s paintings, Albrecht Dürer’s dreams and the photographs of Lee Miller

Why everyone should go to life-drawing classes: Claudette Johnson interviewed

7 October 2023 9:00 am

While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive…

Unmissable: Donatello – Sculpting the Renaissance, at the V&A, reviewed

11 February 2023 9:00 am

‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard…

A choice of art books – from Carpaccio to David Hockney

3 December 2022 9:00 am

Other artists include James Gillray, Quentin Blake, Lucian Freud – and those inspired over the centuries by an overlooked subject in art history: the egg

The jewel-bright, mesmerisingly detailed pictures by Raqib Shaw are a revelation

21 May 2022 9:00 am

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…

Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican's Postwar Modern reviewed

19 March 2022 9:00 am

Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…

Beautiful and revealing: The Three Pietàs of Michelangelo, at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, reviewed

5 March 2022 9:00 am

The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…

Astonishing and gripping: Van Gogh's Self Portraits at the Courtauld reviewed

12 February 2022 9:00 am

In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…

Feral showstoppers and some of the greatest paintings of the 20th century: Francis Bacon at the RA reviewed

29 January 2022 9:00 am

Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford

This radical Nativity is also one of the great whodunnits of art history

18 December 2021 9:00 am

Martin Gayford on a radical Nativity that is the subject of one of the great whodunnits of art history

A celebration of natural wonders: the best of the year’s art books

4 December 2021 9:00 am

If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs…

Ignore the wall text and focus on the magnificent paintings: Tate Britain's Hogarth and Europe reviewed

4 December 2021 9:00 am

There are, perhaps, two types of exhibition visitor. Those who read the texts on the walls and those who don’t.…

His final paintings are like Jackson Pollocks: RA's Late Constable reviewed

27 November 2021 9:00 am

On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…

The supreme pictures of the Courtauld finally have a home of equal magnificence

20 November 2021 9:00 am

When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…

Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century Andy Warhol

13 November 2021 9:00 am

Gossipy, amusing, a little vain, Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century Andy Warhol, says Martin Gayford

The yumminess of paint

18 September 2021 9:00 am

‘Painting has always been dead,’ Willem de Kooning once mused. ‘But I was never worried about it.’ The exhibition Mixing…

Deserves to be much better known: Sophie Taeuber-Arp at Tate Modern reviewed

28 August 2021 9:00 am

Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and…

Why I will miss our mighty cooling towers – and I suspect I am not alone

21 August 2021 9:00 am

There are many examples of beautiful old buildings being knocked down in favour of undistinguished new ones. But not everything can be preserved in aspic, says Martin Gayford

Full of masterpieces: Paula Rego at Tate Britain reviewed

24 July 2021 9:00 am

The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the…

An immensely rich show – though it consists of only two paintings: Rubens at the Wallace Collection reviewed

5 June 2021 9:00 am

‘When pictures painted as companions are separated,’ John Constable wisely observed, ‘the purchaser of one, without being aware of it,…

Rodin was as modern as Magritte and Dali, but more touching and troubling than either

29 May 2021 9:00 am

Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined…

From temple to labyrinth — the art museum today

10 April 2021 9:00 am

At a certain point, the critic Robert Hughes once noted, at the heart of American cities churches began to be…

How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals

6 March 2021 9:00 am

Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…

Francis Bacon: king of the self-made myth

13 February 2021 9:00 am

In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…

On the trail of one of the first artists to paint ordinary things

19 December 2020 9:00 am

The Master of Flémalle was one of the first painters to depict in detail the reality of ordinary things. But who was he? Martin Gayford finds a prime suspect