Arts & Culture

‘Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things’ (c.1500) by Hieronymus Bosch.

Siege Art

Hal Foster

24 May 2025

To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance develop unevenly over time, ‘anachronically’, in myriad acts of reception? With his jagged punctuation Joseph Leo Koerner, demonstrates, effectively, that this is not an either/or. 

Read more about Pinstriped Tycoon: Siege Art

Leopold’s Legacy

Jeremy Harding

24 May 2025

An hour​ into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from . . .

‘Riefenstahl’

Michael Wood

24 May 2025

Luis Buñuel​ worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s . . .

Painting in Siena

Erin Maglaque

24 May 2025

In​ 1345, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a monumental mappa mundi for the wall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. At the axis of its rotating concentric wheels was the little city. For painters, Siena was . . .

At Crufts

Rosa Lyster

22 May 2025

Every March​, over the course of four days, thousands and thousands of dogs go to a conference centre outside Birmingham. They arrive in waves, the dogs, according to the order in which they will be . . .

Picasso and Tragedy

T.J. Clark, 17 August 2017

Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.

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Swoonatra

Ian Penman, 2 July 2015

Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.

Read more about Swoonatra

Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.

Read more about Is Wagner bad for us?

At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.

Read more about At the End of My Pencil

It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

Gilberto Perez, 27 June 2002

A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.

Read more about It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Michael Wood, 7 September 2000

‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...

Read more about That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.

Read more about Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

The Raphael Question

Lawrence Gowing, 15 March 1984

When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...

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Dressing and Undressing

Anita Brookner, 15 April 1982

Fashion,​ according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...

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At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Rosemary Hill, 22 May 2025

A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...

Read more about At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...

Read more about Cool Tricking: Terrence Malick melts away

Victor Hugo​ was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...

Read more about At the Royal Academy: Victor Hugo’s Drawings

Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...

Read more about R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Pang: Mondrian goes dancing

At the Barbican: On Noah Davis

Emily LaBarge, 8 May 2025

Noah Davis’s work is distinguished by a revelry and a commitment to the figures he brings into his image world. There are few non-Black subjects here. That in itself was a political choice, as well as...

Read more about At the Barbican: On Noah Davis

At the Movies: ‘La Haine’

Michael Wood, 8 May 2025

‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the...

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We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time.  The apparent...

Read more about The Face You Put On: Victorian Snapshots

Alasdair Gray’s illustrations tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of...

Read more about At the Whisky Bond: The Alasdair Gray Archive

At the Movies: ‘Mickey 17’

Michael Wood, 3 April 2025

Edward Ashton’s​ novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave...

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At Pallant House: On Dora Carrington

Rosemary Hill, 3 April 2025

Insofar as Dora Carrington has had a wider reputation, it has rested chiefly on her landscapes. In 2014, Farm at Watendlath (1921) came second in a poll to find the most popular works in British museums....

Read more about At Pallant House: On Dora Carrington

On Drawing

Julian Bell, 3 April 2025

While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead:...

Read more about On Drawing

At the British Museum: Picasso’s Prints

Francis Gooding, 20 March 2025

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...

Read more about At the British Museum: Picasso’s Prints

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...

Read more about Heaven’s Waiting Room: When Powell met Pressburger

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

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...

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At the Movies: ‘I’m Still Here’

Michael Wood, 6 March 2025

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...

Read more about At the Movies: ‘I’m Still Here’

At K20: On Yoko Ono

Frances Morgan, 6 March 2025

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 –...

Read more about At K20: On Yoko Ono

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...

Read more about Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

At Compton Verney: Portrait Miniatures

Elizabeth Goldring, 20 February 2025

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...

Read more about At Compton Verney: Portrait Miniatures

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