Arts & Culture

The Yale Centre for British Art is home to the largest collection of British art outside the UK. At the museum’s core is a foundational gift of works from Paul Mellon, who used his banking fortune...

The Royal Academy’s exhibition sets out to show that there is more to Richard Dadd than the mad artist away with the fairies. Had he not been an inmate of Bedlam then Broadmoor, he would have been,...

In the years before the Southbank Centre finally managed to nobble it, the Undercroft was still a free, undetermined space. It wasn’t controllable, it wasn’t set aside, it wasn’t closed...

Desire is the great leveller in these pictures, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston cremes or pumpkin pie slices are like close-ups in the movies. They make us swoon. Even alone in a room with one of his...

Artists used to learn their craft through imitation, and one could learn a lot from copying Johns’s paintings: where the pictorial commas are; the way an image becomes an object; how an edge changes...

In an interview Claude Chabrol suggests that ‘real writers’ – real crime writers, that is – ‘are interested in the behaviour of those who kill others. That is not the case...

It’s not enjoyable to look at a crap painting (though Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two of the biggest Hollywood hitmakers of all time, each own a large collection of Norman Rockwells), and...

Almost in exchange for the trustingness of his subjects, Peter Hujar became a different person when he was behind the camera: his rage, which caused one of his close friends to describe him in an obituary...

‘I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,’ Model wrote. ‘And that was something I really wanted to photograph.’ The Jazz Pictures shows her feeling...

We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but...

The world exceeds us. It comes to us out of darkness. The cave is the universe, the nightly presence of that unknown glitter. What is it, this blackness? Where are they, the lights? Are they, is it, plural...

Catherine Breillat is an intellectual filmmaker. Her films pose ethical questions about desire and aesthetic questions about representation; in particular, they ask how explicit cinema can be without...

I don’t​ remember when I first learned to make cyanotypes, but I had loved Anna Atkins’s prints for many years when I found myself in the grip of an obsession with her work, and with...

‘Our press you know, is to give birth to every monster in the vicinity,’ Virginia Woolf told Clive Bell. Hogarth’s next three publications would be Mansfield’s Prelude (1918),...

Steven Spielberg uses the extraterrestrial as a stand-in for almost anything strange. It’s not always a virtue, but there may be interesting thoughts behind the ragged obvious ones. Think of the...

Zurbarán has always seemed to me an engaging but second division painter. Seeing many of his paintings across all the genres together, I realised I was wrong. They are mesmerising.

In 1848, the US seized the northern half of Mexico, from California to New Mexico, and imposed American law and the English language – a reminder that most of what is now the United States of America...

The music Bernard Herrmann wrote for The Wrong Man is diffident, sometimes almost unnoticeable. His score for Hitchcock’s next film, Vertigo, is loud, lushly romantic and Wagnerian. But in some...