Dali
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in…
The joy of hanging out with artists
Lynn Barber finds painters and sculptors easily the most congenial people to interview - despite having received a death threat from the Chapman brothers
Why was Sigmund Freud so obsessed with Egypt?
Twenty years ago, I visited the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna with a party of American journalists. Even in those…
How an anarchist music student become of the fashion greats: the life of Christian Dior
Strange to think when you visit the Christian Dior show at the V&A that his time as designer was so…
It’s the thought that counts
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
The Mad Boy, Peter Watson, Cecil Beaton and the limo — by Sofka Zinovieff
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
The art of Coke
The Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle is 100 years old. Stephen Bayley salutes a design classic
What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
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…
