Arts & Culture

Ruysch was a meticulous observer of nature, an artist whose insects seem real enough to buzz out of their frames. But her most innovative compositions have an unlikely aspect, a touch of the improbability...

Paintings – or perhaps, in the first instance, prints and reproductions – seem to have attracted Henry Clay Frick from a young age. When, in the early 1870s, he applied for a loan from a Pittsburgh...

John Singer Sargent was a certain kind of rootless American. Born in Italy, where he first learned to sketch and paint, he set foot in the US only at the age of twenty and spent most of his adult life...

At his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be...

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing...

Payne Knight’s greatest desire was that the British Museum would provide the public free access to an unrivalled resource for the study of antiquity and of art. His collection was, first and foremost,...

Linton Kwesi Johnson​ has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music ... is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration...

David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would...

For a while, Leigh Bowery touted himself as a legitimate if outré fashion designer, but it’s clear from the Tate show that it was never going to work: he was too addicted to the one-off extravagance...

Erik Satie is the progenitor of torch songs and lounge music, systems music and minimalism, even (with his later innovation, ‘musique d’ameublement’) muzak and ambient music. Mahler’s influence,...

Paris was Agnès Varda’s working milieu for most of her life. She approached it at times like a canny native informant, at others like a child enchanted by a sprawling circus whose routines changed from...

Alice Neel liked to say that she painted all of a person: ‘What the world has done to them and their retaliation’. The opposite might be said of Amy Sherald: she seems less concerned with the bruised...

Golf lends itself to spectacle. There’s a special thrill to the shape of the perfectly hit shot, a kind of lingering, dreamy eloquence. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical,...

Orsanmichele market had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day...

Rory McEwen’s work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious desire to please. It was in itself a perverse choice for an artist in the 1960s to take up flower...

Western critics take Jafar Panahi’s ‘banned’ status to mean that he cannot legally make films in Iran, but in fact it means that he can’t work with the state (not that he would want to) or access...

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for...

Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement...