Exhibitions
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…
Don’t mock Elvis’s style - he was ahead of the curve
In the giftshop at the new Elvis exhibition at the Dome, you can buy your own version of his flared…
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…
The future of the album lies in the gallery
The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of…
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.…
Geometry in the 20th and 21st centuries was adventurous - and apocalyptic
Almost a decade ago, David Cameron informed Tony Blair, unkindly but accurately, ‘You were the future once.’ A visitor to…
The tragic tale of the Two Roberts is a story of two artists cut off in their prime
In 1933, two new students met on their first day at Glasgow School of Art. From then on they were…
The death of the life class
‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life…
We must never again let this 19th century Norwegian master slip into oblivion
You won’t have heard of Peder Balke. Yet this long-neglected painter from 19th-century Norway is now the subject of a…
Does Allen Jones deserve a retrospective at the Royal Academy?
It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks…
Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
Without a model, Moroni could be stunningly dull. With one, he was peerless...
Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued,…
Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda
One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated…
The secret world of the artist's mannequin
A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft…
How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction
Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet
‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966…
All my doubts about Anselm Kiefer are blown away by his Royal Academy show
In the Royal Academy’s courtyard are two large glass cases or vitrines containing model submarines. In one the sea has…
Curator-driven ambitions mar this Constable show at the V&A
The V&A has an unparalleled collection of hundreds of works by John Constable (1776–1837), but hardly anyone seems to know…
Tate Britain’s Turner show reveals an old master - though the Spectator didn’t think so at the time
Juvenilia is the work produced during an artist’s youth. It would seem logical to think, therefore, that an artist’s output…
‘Likes’, lacquered cherry pies and Anselm Kiefer: the weird world of post-internet art
In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new…
