Arts feature
Whodunnit?
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was…
What's that thing? Britain's worst public art
Bad public art pollutes our townscapes. Stephen Bayley names and shames the worst offenders as he unveils the winner of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award
Public offence
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3 There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers…
Nikolai Astrup - Norway’s other great painter
The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie
Magnetic north
‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does…
Eugene Delacroix foresaw the future of society not just art
Delacroix’s frigid self-control concealed an emotional volcano. Martin Gayford explores the paradoxes that define the apostle of modernism
‘It’s good to chop out the boring bits!’: Andrew Davies on adapting War and Peace
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
Wild at heart
At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the…
Pornographer-in-Chief
Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in…
John Dee thought he could talk to angels using medieval computer technology
John Dee liked to talk to spirits but he was no loony witch, says Christopher Howse
Away with the angels?
I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first…
A short history of statue-toppling
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
Moving statues
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche…
Galleries are getting bigger - but is there enough good art to put in them?
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
Best in show
Until a decade and a half ago, we had no national museum of modern art at all. Indeed, the stuff…
Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?
Martin Gayford investigates how this splendid Tahitian Madonna came about and why religion was ever-present in Gauguin's art
The art of Beatrix Potter
Her best illustrations — limpid, ethereal, carefully observed — are masterly works of art in their own right, argues Matthew Dennison
The art of Beatrix Potter
‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code.…
Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?
A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth,…
Nottingham resuscitates a classic of the 60s literary avant-garde
Peter Robins reports from Nottingham on a unique adaptation of a novel by the literary innovator B.S. Johnson
New word order
In the basement of a busy café in Hockley, Nottingham, which may not have known exactly what it was letting…
The bicycle may have triumphed over the car but it’s far from perfect
The bicycle may have triumphed over the car but it’s far from perfect, argues Stephen Bayley
The bicycle may have triumphed but it’s far from perfect
It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We…
Julia Margaret Cameron: the Leonardo of photography
Ruskin dismissed Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs as untrue. But, argues Martin Gayford, the same could be said of any picture
Artificial life
One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and…
