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…
There’s not a trace of shaving foam in sight in the early Turners on show at Salisbury Museum
It has often been related how, towards the end of his long life, a critical barb got under J.M.W. Turner’s…
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…
![‘Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) [6]’, 1943, by Barbara Hepworth](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/exhibitions1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
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.…
Grayson Perry - heir to Lewis Caroll and William Blake
At the Turner Prize dinner of 2003, as the winner, Grayson Perry, took a photo call with his family wearing…
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 —…
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
Modernism lite? Modigliani at the Estorick Collection reviewed
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of…
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…
Irresistible: Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed
The most unusual picture in the exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery, in terms of subject-matter…
Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It's certainly the strangest
In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve…
Reimaging the lost masterpieces of antiquity
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy reviewed: among the best visual evocations of LA there are
It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal…
Flying witches, mad old men, cannibals: what was going on in Goya’s head?
It is not impossible to create good art that makes a political point, just highly unusual. Goya’s ‘Third of May’…
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…
Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain reviewed: entertainingly barmy
In the centre of the new exhibition Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain there is a huge white elephant. The beast…
Sargent, National Portrait Gallery, review: he was so good he should have been better
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern reviewed: 'remarkable'
‘Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting,’ Henri Matisse once advised, ‘should begin by cutting out his own tongue.’ Marlene…
Rubens and His Legacy at the Royal Academy reviewed: his imitators fall short of their master miserably
The main spring offering at the Royal Academy, Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, teaches two useful lessons.…
How will the British public take to Rubens’s fatties?
Are Rubens’s figures too fat for the British to appreciate them? Martin Gayford investigates
