Arts & Culture

If her work has been admired, it has sometimes come at a cost to her philosophy. Ruth Asawa’s statements about the therapeutic nature of art-making are usually glossed over by curators, as is the proximity...

Xavier Giannoli’s​ Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...

Basketball players are larger than life – the average NBA player is six and a half feet tall. Going to a game is like entering an episode of Star Trek in which the Enterprise has landed on a planet that...

Charles Ray’s sculptures seem to capture the moment before our perception fixes, before we recognise a form for what it represents: a torso, a body, a woman or man. This is what looking at sculpture...

Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....

Breton called Magritte the ‘cuckoo’s egg’ of Surrealism, and though his work did eventually hatch in the Surrealist nest, he had little interest, as a very calculated painter, in Surrealist practices...

Part of what is interesting, or unsettling, in Maeve Gilmore’s work is her use of contrasts: not only in terms of colour and pattern, but also in her symbolism. The mood of Boys in Orchard is melancholy,...

The prints in Un Village suggest that Madeleine de Sinéty was eager to be part of the network of social relations she discovered in Poilley, the manners and protocols of village life, its rhythms of labour...

EastEnders is not, or not only, a slice-of-life drama. Like all soap operas, like all operas, it repeatedly oversteps the limit. The idea of ‘digging the dirt’ is given a whole new meaning, as if the...

The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...

Children​ have some of the best lines in Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski and following not very hard on the heels of the original, which came out in 1986. When Penny Benjamin...

In July​ 2007 I drove west from New Haven for eight hours to Getzville, north of Buffalo, to meet Magda Cordell. She was then in her eighties; I wanted to ask her about life as an artist in...

The point of view is that of the operator of a drone or missile locked onto its target, as the dissolves take us from one appointment to another with Schwarzkopfian relish. Still, hurry isn’t the whole...

Thomas Gainsborough complained that he was ‘sick of portraits’, but he seems, nonetheless, to have valued his fancy pictures – these were the works for which he charged the highest prices. And unlike...

Carlo Crivelli invites us to think about the nature of art and illusion. Does the trick of painting a fly on a painting serve also to remind us that the painting itself is a work of fiction, or does it...

Roy DeCarava saw things that other people didn’t. He saw beauty in a crushed aluminium can and the light behind a pair of curtains. He could see music, not just hear it. His pictures capture what jazz...

The world Jacques Lartigue took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the names – or rather, the nicknames – are part of its sonic environment. Lartigue...

Yves Saint Laurent’s​ admirers seemed determined to memorialise him when he was alive and by the end of his career they had largely succeeded. In 1983, he was the first living designer to...