ethnography

‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet

20 July 2024 9:00 am

My writing is mere bricolage … whatever I do, I only half do’, wails Michel Leiris in the final volume of his self-lacerating autobiography

Ignore the activists – Humboldt’s Enlightenment project deserves celebrating

9 January 2021 9:00 am

Ignore the activists, says Tristram Hunt, Alexander von Humboldt’s Enlightenment project, embodied in a flash new Berlin museum, deserves celebrating

Wooden head from southern Nigeria, collected by Northcote W. Thomas in 1910

Lucian Freud insisted a forgery could be as great as the real thing. Was he right?

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent,…

The ‘soul canoe’ from New Guinea is a sculpture as powerful as any by Brancusi

Full of fabulous, but baffling, things: Oceania reviewed

13 October 2018 9:00 am

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As…