Exhibitions
Mothers’ ruin
At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting…
Space odyssey
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
Silent films
On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the…
Snap, crackle and op
Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…
Nothing is quite what it seems
One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…
Object lesson
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
Maximum wattage
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
A game for two
Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head. But portraiture is a game for two.…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
American quartet
Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether…
The better angels of our nature
Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics…
Dealer’s choice
One evening a few weeks ago I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition at the Venice…
Being and nothingness
Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art…
League of nations
‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…
Put a spell on you
Many of the mediums from which art is made have been around for a long time. People have been painting…
Constable on sea
John Constable was, as we say these days, conflicted about Brighton. On the one hand, as he wrote in a…
The good, the indifferent and the simply awful
‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a…
Home is where the art is
The house in which I lived in Tokyo was built by my landlady, a former geisha. It stood on a…
A word in your ear
Do you, or do you not, fork out for an audioguide — one of those necklace-like, strappy contraptions you’re offered…
Cut it out
How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together…
Home help
There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others…
Home help
There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others…
Snap happy
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
Snap happy
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
On the make
Rudolfo Paolozzi was a great maker. In the summer, he worked almost without stopping in the family’s ice-cream shop, making…
