V&a
A lot of art is trickery - and all the better for it
One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street…
V&A's Botticelli Reimagined has too many desperate pretenders
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it…
Britain is absent from the V&A’s new Europe galleries. Are they trying to tell us something?
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
Galleries are getting bigger - but is there enough good art to put in them?
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
The rise and fall of Sony
Sony was the Apple of its day and more. Stephen Bayley charts its years of creativity unrivalled in the history of consumerism
Portrait of the week
Home The all-party Foreign Affairs Committee urged David Cameron, the Prime Minister, not to press ahead with a Commons vote…
Camp carnival: Roy Strong’s 80th birthday pageant
For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book…
What are modern museums really for?
Do we really need museums in the age of Wikipedia and Google? William Cook thinks we do but his children don’t agree
Luxury isn’t the opposite of poverty but the opposite of vulgarity - but don’t tell the V&A
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
Boris Johnson on his plans for the Olympic Park: inspired or whimsical?
Jack Wakefield on the Mayor’s ambitious, not to say whimsical, vision for the Olympic Park
50 shades of beige: English National Ballet's Modern Masters at Sadler's Wells, reviewed
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
Alexander McQueen may have been a prat but at least he was an interesting one
Alexander McQueen may have been a prat but at least he was an interesting one, says Shura Slater
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 reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Why are students of curation being taught to ignore the public and be suspicious of enterprise?
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Curator-driven ambitions mar this Constable show at the V&A
The V&A has an unparalleled collection of hundreds of works by John Constable (1776–1837), but hardly anyone seems to know…
Agitprop, love trucks and leaflet bombs: the art of protest
Titles can be misleading, and in case you have visions of microwave ovens running amok or washing machines crunching up…
William Kent was an ideas man - the Damien Hirst of the 18th century
How important is William Kent (1685–1748)? He’s not exactly a household name and yet this English painter and architect, apprenticed…
A master craftsman of the anecdote
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to…
Would you have been let in to an '80s club?
People will go to extraordinary lengths to get into a nightclub. Nowadays you must wear something tight, and look slinky.…
The man who transformed houses
Alec Cobbe is a designer, painter, musician, picture restorer and collector, and has recently donated drawings, photographs and other archives…
How China's Bayeux Tapestry differs from ours
The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’,…
What my addiction to Chinese painting made me do
My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection…
Pearls: if you’ve got ’em, wear ’em
‘Women spend more money on their ears in pearl earrings than on any other part of their person.’ So said…
