Arts & Culture

Picasso’s perpetual object is the human body, which is everywhere remodelled, schematised and simplified, rendered breathtakingly beautiful one moment and grotesquely ugly the next, and always treated...

Pressburger described their collaboration as a great romance: ‘Powell knows what I am going to say even before I say it – maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare. You are lucky...

Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...

Some critics feel the effervescence of I’m Still Here is an avoidance of reality. I agree that something seems off here. The carnival effect is definitely excessive, but Walter Salles can hardly not...

The Yoko Ono who makes prickly, sprawling rock albums can seem an altogether different artist from the one whose text scores – with their concise invitations to creativity contained in neat squares –...

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my...

Unlike large oil paintings, miniatures demand to be experienced close up. They had the great virtue of being portable – and, therefore, of helping to create intimacy (or the illusion of intimacy) over...

By the end of 1979, hesitation had given way to dread. We fully expected to be facing the end of the world. Margaret Thatcher had been elected; Russia invaded Afghanistan; Reagan announced he was running...

On​ the morning of 18 April 2023, the chess grandmaster Ding Liren was discussing tactics with his coach. He was due to play game 7 of his world championship match against Ian Nepomniachtchi that afternoon....

Cyclicality – its rhythms, its humour – is central to Nan Goldin’s work. A title such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with its reference to a song, indicates something of the claim the work...

Stanford was among the first composers in Britain to write church music that was not automatically relegated to the background; and it was Stanford who, through being professor of music at both Cambridge...

The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical...

Despite the importance of the architectural meaning of the film’s title, the other meaning, the wrong meaning, is also intimately everywhere, and Brady Corbet does tempt us to believe that nothing and...

It's largely thanks to Loach's example that social realism remains a potent and versatile cultural resource for young filmmakers with something to say about working-class experience in Britain here and...

This is what’s weird about Tinguely: what should be forbidding and abstract – mechanised geometries, industrial detritus – is full of personality. Clearly, people were drawn to him, and he was drawn...

Can the art of political photomontage continue to function as print declines and memes both crude and ingenious proliferate?

Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick...

Abba became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations...