More from Arts
Why do people in theatre hate their audiences?
Lloyd Evans bemoans theatre’s new hostility towards paying punters
The day I sold my destroyed piano to the Tate
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking…
The puppetry renaissance
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
Why do British galleries shun the humane, generous art of Ruskin Spear?
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is…
Brought to book
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…
The art of the Christmas card
It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It…
How crazy was Louis Wain?
Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s…
The supreme pictures of the Courtauld finally have a home of equal magnificence
When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…
The unseen Victoria Wood
For a few years now I have been living with Victoria Wood. That sounds all wrong, obviously, and yet no…
'You should see some of the other scripts that come through': Robert Carlyle interviewed
Robert Jackman talks to Robert Carlyle about Begbie, playing a Tory prime minister and the merits of keeping your head down
Absurd and amusing, solemn and scholarly: Charles Jencks's Cosmic House reviewed
An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets,…
Sale of the century: the contents of the Sitwells' mansion are going under the hammer
In my bedroom there is a small lidded laundry basket. It was designed by Geoffrey Lusty for Lloyd Loom, a…
The vivid memory-scapes of Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai
Tanjil Rashid on the vivid memory-scapes of Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai
The Turner Prize shortlist is an embarrassment
In 2019 I was asked to be on the jury for the Turner Prize. I was pretty happy about this.…
The art of the asparagus
Manet’s ‘Botte d’asperges’ are probably the most famous asparagus in the world. The artist painted the delicious white- and lilac-tinged…
The bizarre art of Scottie Wilson deserves to be better known
On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog…
‘I’ve seen the bare bones of London’: street painter Peter Brown interviewed
‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete…
The artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
Can VR help to sell art to kids?
Some pictures are now so mediated that their actual physicality has long been dwarfed by a million reproductions. The ‘Mona…
Community music-making is the jewel in the British crown
Community music-making is the unifying jewel in the British crown, says James MacMillan
How 20th-century artists rescued the Crucifixion
Two millennia ago, in the outer reaches of the empire, the Romans performed a routine execution of a Galilean rebel.…
Why are the Oscars such a lousy guide to great cinema?
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland,predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes…
Clubhouse left me with one question: why am I here?
For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I could…
How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals
Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…
Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?
I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington.…
