Echoes of Italy
‘Hidden beauty is best (half seen), faces turned away.’ So noted a young English painter named Winifred Knights in 1924.…
Jumbled up
‘In the end, nothing goes with anything,’ Lucian Freud remarked one afternoon years ago. ‘It’s your taste that puts things…
Jumbled up
‘In the end, nothing goes with anything,’ Lucian Freud remarked one afternoon years ago. ‘It’s your taste that puts things…
Split decision
In 1992 I wrote a column that was published under the headline ‘It’s Time to Split the Tate’. To my…
Split decision
In 1992 I wrote a column that was published under the headline ‘It’s Time to Split the Tate’. To my…
Let’s talk about sex
At one time, Damien Hirst was fond of remarking that art should deal with the Gauguin questions. Namely, ‘Where do…
Let’s talk about sex
At one time, Damien Hirst was fond of remarking that art should deal with the Gauguin questions. Namely, ‘Where do…
What lies beneath
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
Happy ending
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Happy ending
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Surreal, strange and scatological
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Is it art or science?
William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for…
The rise and fall of Sicily
A few weeks ago, I looked out on the Cathedral of Monreale from the platform on which once stood the…
Florence
Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms.…
Old masters
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
The counterfeiters
One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street…
Repeat prescription
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Hellzapoppin’
The 20th-century painter who called himself Balthus once proposed that a monograph about him should begin with the words ‘Balthus…
Whodunnit?
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was…
‘So quick and chancy’
When asked the question ‘What is art?’, Andy Warhol gave a characteristically flip answer (‘Isn’t that a guy’s name?’). On…
Show me the Monet
Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him…
Wild at heart
At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the…
Disciple of Duchamp
Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously…
Moving statues
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche…
Best in show
Until a decade and a half ago, we had no national museum of modern art at all. Indeed, the stuff…
