“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”

“... not from photographs. The crumpled faces and sculpted beaks which emerge from the webs of lines in David Levine’s wonderful pen drawings for the New York Review of Books, and his watercolour and pencil heads for the New Yorker, tend to be riffs on existing images. Boxer, in many ways a far less accomplished artist, achieved likeness though a grasp of ...”

“... of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration might look like? Turn to Ingres’s portrait of Amédée-David, Comte de Pastorait – ‘a promising bureaucrat’ under Napoleon who, by 1826, when the portrait was painted, had become Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion ...”

“... about fashion and its presentation. Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970 and David LaChapelle’s photographs both run until 23 December. An exhibition at the V&A of Gianni Versace’s clothes runs until 12 January.* All three tangle with the paradoxes of taste and exclusivity. LaChapelle embraces Truman Capote’s ‘Good taste is the ...”

“... as from their kinetic extravagance. Auerbach’s achievement is formidable. Unlike his teacher, David Bomberg, whose diverse stylistic excursions seem to test his talent as though he feared he had missed its true direction, Auerbach has followed a single line. His life’s work hangs together – the most recent pictures developing ideas about painting ...”

“... or Noel Coward’s dressing gown) was to hint at undisclosed inclinations. He found a partner, David Ball – also an assistant and a model. In the 1980s Robert Mapplethorpe was one of those much taken with McBean’s photographs of him. He died in 1990, on his 86th birthday. He had come out of retirement from time to time to work for smart magazines, but ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... death), the seriousness and the sitter’s sober prosperity do not. When modern caricaturists like David Levine put pulled-about faces on small bodies their drawings project a more distinct personality than is found in their source material – usually paintings and photographs. The characterless little heads and drawn-out bodies of fashion plates do the ...”

“... who looks back to Vermeer (he made his own version of a Vermeer letter-reader) and to Caspar David Friedrich’s woman at a window, painted in subdued greys, blacks, browns that owe something to Whistler. Gwen John, who was taught by Whistler, put on paint in calculated patches; the chalkiness of her paint and the thinness of Hammershøi’s match the ...”

“... unhappy. The unexplained strangeness of the ordinary or tacky that has drawn film-makers like David Lynch to Eggleston is evident, but the colour also registers at a different level. As in Van Gogh’s late paintings it has a life of its own. Purely as coloured objects, the photographs are rich, subtle, pretty even. The process used to print them in the ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... impulse is chilled have tended to be a Northern, and particularly a German speciality. Caspar David Friedrich’s mountains and deserted seashores are melancholy accounts of man’s place in nature. Emil Nolde’s seas and sunsets have no place for man at all. It is the way Kiefer’s work seems to refer to how things are, without spelling out precisely ...”

“... associations. Murals and altarpieces take on something from the churches they were painted for; David Smith’s, Rodin’s and Brancusi’s sculpture looked best in their studios. Donald Judd has gone so far as to develop the Chinati Foundation in Texas just to show his work; you can see why the pieces by him in one of the most successful rooms in the new ...”

“... energies went into it: a script by Troy Kennedy Martin, music by Eric Clapton, direction by Martin Campbell (who also directed the Bourne-like version of 2009); and performances equal to any of that decade, by Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker. A fine thing about the movie was that it required thought. Indeed, the subject of the 1985 Edge of Darkness was the ...”

“... notes, though. Revealing, since his vanity was the main issue, were the settings in which Alastair Campbell chose to present himself: two Palladian interiors that would not have shamed a head of state. His simple joy at the vindication of the truth about as convincing as Jonathan Aitken’s dedication to it. Almost the only heartening note was the outright ...”