Picasso
This Parisian exhibition has rewritten the story of art
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Bernard Buffet: painter and poser
Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was…
Rambert Dance: one piercing masterpiece - and one dud
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
Alexander Calder: the man who made abstract art fly
One day, in October 1930, Alexander Calder visited the great abstract painter Piet Mondrian in his apartment in Paris. The…
Hurrah! Demi Moore is Pugs club’s new Mistress of Chamber
If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk out the joint in Amsterdam…
Portrait of the week
Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while…
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…
Modernism lite? Modigliani at the Estorick Collection reviewed
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of…
Better than Robert? Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern reviewed
In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a…
Andrew Marr’s diary: Why this is such a tooth-grindingly awful election
So far, what an infuriating election campaign. We have the most extraordinary array of digital, paper and broadcasting media at…
The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?
What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds…
Viktor Yanukovych’s palace is full of tasteless treasures – and London auction-house tags
Quite a few of the former president Yanukovych’s ‘treasures’ seem to carry tags from London auctioneers
John Craxton was more gifted than the Fitzwilliam show suggests
It is often said of John Craxton (1922–2009) that he knew how to live well and considered this more important…
All the fun of the fair
The Works on Paper annual fair runs from 6 to 9 February at the Science Museum. Its name is a…
