Anne Wagner

Picasso​ was a painter of themes. Themes, not subjects or ‘subject matter’: he pointed out the difference to André Malraux in 1937, just before Guernica left his studio for the Paris World’s Fair. Malraux had remarked that though neither of them put much stock in ‘subject matter’, on this occasion, in painting the great mural, his subject had served...

There was once​ a time when, in the eyes of advanced American taste-makers, Grant Wood led the list of home-grown artists who ought to be dismissed. Clement Greenberg, for example, used his column in the Nation to make it clear that nothing by Wood and his fellow figurative painters, not even their most successful compositions, was anything like as interesting as an unsuccessful picture by...

A century ago​ Roger Fry tried to sum up Rodin’s approach to the human figure. What mattered most to Rodin, Fry decided, was the ‘unit’, not unity: ‘His conception of a figure is always so exceptional, so extreme, that every part of the figure is instinct with the central idea, every detail of hand or foot is an epitome of the whole, and the final composition of...

The exhibition​ Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-79 (until 29 August), concise, intelligently installed, with something of the clarity and balance of a well-designed book, is an important occasion. And its readerly qualities are all to the good, given that the conceptualist generation (the majority were born in the 1930s and 1940s) shared a preference for working with words, if in an...

To see the Tate’s Hepworth retrospective is to realise that nothing in it rides on the idea of modern art’s ‘true home’. On the contrary, the show argues that where modern sculpture is concerned there was, and could be, no such place. Hepworth’s work, it aims to demonstrate, was both a proposal and an investigation which went on imagining a new kind of existence in public: not in the world the artist knew, but in one she hoped for, ‘a modern world’ in which sculptural form might come alive through the relationships it established, the spaces it created, the sensations it explored, the depths it plumbed.