Arts & Culture

Caxton’s early interest in print was probably commercial rather than technical, that of a publisher rather than an inventor. But his interest in literature ran deep, not only as a reader but also as...

Willem De Kooning’s Suburb in Havana is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants...

Printmaker, portraitist, landscape artist, theatre designer and illustrator, William Nicholson slips through the fingers of art historians. This exhibition explores the Venn diagram of his career with...

Rather than the manifestos and self-conscious rejection of inherited tradition seen in European art, Nigerian modernism – insofar as one can generalise about such a heterogeneous period – saw artists...

The notion of the Great Composer – the individual genius, whose inimitable music is an expression of a singular mind – still holds sway. By contrast, the men and women who composed the music discussed...

More has probably been written about The Ambassadors than about any other work by Holbein. Is the painting a commentary on the religious divisions threatening to rip apart Christendom in the early 1530s?...

Time is embedded in the way Mark Jenkin works – not just the occasional resurrection but the hand-cranked cameras and hand-processed film. His method involves hearing the fractions of a second ticking...

The careers of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Maria Cosway required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn a living,...

In 1983, Brian Wilson told a reporter: ‘I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.’ This boy-child’s story has recognisable stages: he begins in a kind of innocence,...

Lam referred to a ‘desire to include in my painting all the transculturation that had occurred in Cuba’ – using a term coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the island’s...

I listen to The Archers every night, as automatically as I brush my teeth. Yet the episodes are quite often dull and frequently irritating. The cast has at least one dud actor. Characters are more like...

If we imagine Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings as depending on what we might call a ‘cruising eye’ – one that focuses on instances of men watching men, and also instantiates the act of watching...

What is it with these Dutchmen? Did human subjects not exist before them? Did they write the book on patience? (All those letters being written and read, those prayers being said, those scholars at their...

There is much room for improvement in today’s maternity care, but few in Britain would choose to give birth in 1506 rather than 2026, and an ultrasound, though magical in its way, is more useful than...

Almost everything about Wuthering Heights – the artistic photography, the heavy orchestral music, the gestures and speech of the actors – signals the ambitions of a director seeking interesting effects....

Although she often responded to questions with anecdotes and talked about the role of chance and the necessity of pragmatism, Chantal Akerman was a fine theorist of her own work. She couldn’t understand...

Schubert’s​ imagination was unusually literary. Words released music in him: poems about desire, love, loss, solitude, the longing for rest; narrative ballads; philosophical poems; theological poems;...

Like darkness, light at its most powerful could disorientate, overpower, blind the senses. Joseph Wright of Derby’s contemporary viewers associated his night pieces with a kind of sublime unclarity,...