Contemporary art
Intelligent, poetic and profound: Tacita Dean at the National and National Portrait galleries
Andy Warhol would probably have been surprised to learn that his 1964 film ‘Empire’ had given rise to an entire…
Surreal jokes and juicy strokes: Martin Gayford on the power of paint
René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but…
Emotional rescue
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
Space odyssey
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
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…
As he approaches 80, the German master Georg Baselitz contemplates the end
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Pharmacy 2 makes me like Damien Hirst
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
James Turrell interview: ‘I sell blue sky and coloured air’
Martin Gayford talks to the artist James Turrell, who has lit up Houghton Hall like a baroque firework display
Welcome to Japan’s best kept cultural secret: an art island with an underground museum
In his introductory remarks to the Afro–Eurasian Eclipse, one of his later suites for jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington remarked —…
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old clothes and agitprop of the Venice Biennale
This radio programme almost made me like Piers Morgan
An extraordinary black-and-white photograph of a young black boy taken on the Isle of Wight by Julia Margaret Cameron in…
The Heckler: Curators were once donnish scholars. Now they’re hip illiterates
As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…
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’…
If you hate art-world show-offs, Grayson Perry, what's with the frocks?
At the time it was all too easy to get sucked in by the hype. In 2013, Grayson Perry was…
