visual art
‘I’ve seen the bare bones of London’: street painter Peter Brown interviewed
‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete…
The art of storing and unveiling
The way an object is stored can magnify its beauty and enhance expectation. Joanna Rossiter wonders whether the opening up of galleries will have the same effect on an art-starved public
The artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
It's almost touching that the NFT world see itself as radical
Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated…
Can VR help to sell art to kids?
Some pictures are now so mediated that their actual physicality has long been dwarfed by a million reproductions. The ‘Mona…
How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals
Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…
The Sistine Chapel as you've never seen it before
Rosie Millard gets her gloved hands on one of the world’s most lavish – and expensive – art books
Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?
I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington.…
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai are extraordinary
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
Maggi Hambling's Wollstonecraft statue is hideous but fitting
Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky.…
Antony Gormley on why sculpture is far superior to painting
In an extract from their book, Antony Gormley tells Martin Gayford that the 3-D will always trump the 2-D
The mediums who pioneered abstract art
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Looking at Barnett Freedman makes me weep at the government's dismal graphics
Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…
Privatisation is the best option for the South Bank Centre
I must have written about this subject 100 times in 30 years and I’m still having to restate the bloody…
‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’: David Hockney interviewed
Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about life in the Norman countryside under quarantine, how the iPad is better than paint and brush, and why he is not a communist
How to succeed in sculpture (without being a man)
Whee-ooh-whee ya-ya-yang skrittle-skrittle skreeeek… Is it a space pod bearing aliens from Mars? No, it’s a podcast featuring aliens from…
Lucian Freud insisted a forgery could be as great as the real thing. Was he right?
Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent,…
Olafur Eliasson’s art is both futuristic and completely traditional – which is why I love it
Superficially, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern can seem like a theme park. To enter many of the exhibits,…
Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
What makes British art British?
There’s no avoiding the Britishness of British art. It hits me every time I walk outside and see dappled trees…
For many artists being propagandists has become their raison d’être
If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving…
Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years
Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…
The odd couple: Bill Viola / Michelangelo at the RA reviewed
The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable…
It’s hard to think of finer images of children than Gainsborough’s
When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it…
Full of fabulous, but baffling, things: Oceania reviewed
At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As…
