Frank Auerbach
John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene
The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots
Why Tate Modern seems more like a playground than an art gallery
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…
Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican's Postwar Modern reviewed
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
His final paintings are like Jackson Pollocks: RA's Late Constable reviewed
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
German refugees transformed British cultural life - but at a price
German-speaking refugees dragged British culture into the 20th century. But that didn’t go down well in Stepney or Stevenage, says William Cook
On the frontiers of figuration, abstraction and total immateriality
The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it…
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…
2015 in exhibitions - painting still rules
The art on show over the coming year demonstrates that we still live in an age of mighty painters, says Martin Gayford
The death of the life class
‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life…
Andrew Lambirth: Emilio Greco's early work is undeniably his best
Emilio Greco (1913–95) is considered to be one of Italy’s most important modern sculptors, and certainly he was a successful…
