Sculpture
Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a…
Sensory overload: Paul Neagu, Anthony Caro and Bernat Klein reviewed
‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of…
I can’t stop thinking about the Courtauld’s Unfinished exhibition
A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d…
Forget Vienna - Britain now has its own chamber of curiosities at the British Museum
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made.…
Poetic or pretentious? Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy reviewed
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
![‘Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) [6]’, 1943, by Barbara Hepworth](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/exhibitions1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Was Barbara Hepworth a giant of modern sculpture - or a dreary relic of post-war Britain?
In the last two decades of her life, Barbara Hepworth was a big figure in the world of art. A…
Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition reviewed: a jumble sale with pizzazz
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic.…
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
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska at Kettle’s Yard reviewed: he’s got rhythm
One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk…
Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It's certainly the strangest
In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve…
Reimaging the lost masterpieces of antiquity
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
The Spectator declares war on bad public art
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
Sargent, National Portrait Gallery, review: he was so good he should have been better
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
Dallas, city of culture
Dallas has reinvented itself as a major arts destination, says Hugh Graham
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
Marble-mania: when England became a spiritual heir to the ancients
Phrases such as ‘Some aspects of…’ are death at the box-office, so it is not exactly unknown for the titles…
The pop artist whose transgressions went too far – for the PC art world
After years of being effectively banned from exhibiting in his own country, Allen Jones finally reaches the RA with his first major UK retrospective. Andrew Lambirth meets him
Jeff Koons’s latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel
Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager…
The man who brought Cubism to New York
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he…
Michelangelo’s vision was greater even than Shakespeare’s
Alasdair Palmer reveals the monstrous egomaniac behind Michelangelo’s artistic genius
A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park
The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was…
Anne Seymour Damer: the female Bernini?
Anne Seymour Damer (1748–1828) was virtually the only female sculptor working in Britain during her lifetime. Contemporary artists may have…
The age of the starving artist
Philip Hensher on the precarious fortunes of even the most gifted 19th-century artists
