Art history
How long is long enough to look at a work of art?
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…
John Ruskin: the making of a modern prophet
At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living…
The fascinating story behind one of the best-loved depictions of the Nativity
In the early 1370s an elderly Scandinavian woman living in Rome had a vision of the Nativity. Her name was…
Unfolding mysteries: the drama of drapery in Italian art
The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its…
Josef Albers: the Bauhaus artist whose pupil designed Auschwitz
The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was asked why — in the early…
A violent ultimatum ended Giacometti’s brief flirtation with Marlene Dietrich
Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo…
August Auguste
In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
Tug of war over the world’s heritage
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
Is Julian Barnes right to think Lucian Freud will survive? Jonathan Meades thinks not
The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…
Art has ceased to be beautiful or interesting — but we are more obsequious than ever to artists
Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by…
Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark: pen friends, not true friends
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
This beautiful new history of Kew Gardens needs a bit of weeding
Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens is a beautiful book. Lovers of early 20th-century British art will find it hard to stop…
The Artist Formerly Known As Whistler
Sam Leith on the exasperating, charismatic painter who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee
Do Manet's asparagus remind you of your struggling long-term relationship?
In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not…
How honest was Bernard Berenson?
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
A book on Art Deco that's a work of art in itself — but where's the Savoy, Claridge's and the Oxo Tower?
Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them —…
When Francis Davison made me judge — and burn — his art
In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him…
A is for Artist, D is for Dealers
‘S is for Spoof.’ There it is on page 86, a full-page reproduction of a Nat Tate drawing, sold at…
How to avoid bankers in your nativity scene
With an eye to the blasphemy underlying some of the loveliest Renaissance painting, Honor Clerk will be choosing her Christmas cards more carefully this year
Breakfast with Lucian, by Geordie Greig - review
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
The Sunflowers Are Mine, by Martin Bailey - review
‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could…
Edwardian Opulence, edited by Angus Trumble - review
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
