Somerset House

The supreme pictures of the Courtauld finally have a home of equal magnificence

20 November 2021 9:00 am

When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…

How the Beano shaped art

23 October 2021 9:00 am

Stuart Jeffries on the cultural influence of the comic that said it was good to be bad

Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves

14 March 2020 9:00 am

Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker

Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500

21 December 2019 9:00 am

Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…

How capitalism killed sleep

7 December 2019 9:00 am

What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder…

The triumph of hope over experience: the Peanuts gang

Comparing Peanuts to existentialism is an insult – to Peanuts

5 January 2019 9:00 am

For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth, time, Lucy van Pelt offers to hold the football for Charlie Brown so he…

A fusion of ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’ and Dungeons and Dragons, Dashi Namdakov’s ‘She Guardian’ is a grotesque, inappropriate and embarrassing intrusion into London

What's that thing? Britain's worst public art

6 February 2016 9:00 am

Bad public art pollutes our townscapes. Stephen Bayley names and shames the worst offenders as he unveils the winner of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award

Map of the Island of Utopia, book frontispiece, 1563

Even Corbyn would find Thomas More’s Utopia too leftwing

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook

Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate

12 December 2015 9:00 am

Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never…

Forces of nature: Maggi Hambling with ‘Amy Winehouse’, a painting exhibited at her Walls of Water show last year

‘This stuff goes on being alive’: Maggi Hambling on the power of painting

18 April 2015 9:00 am

Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt, Twombly and the power of art

Sound and vision: spectators watch Polly Harvey in a glass box recording her new album

The future of the album lies in the gallery

14 February 2015 9:00 am

The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of…

The most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was…