Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking...
J ohn Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the...
I was reading in a coffee shop a couple of months ago when a young man asked if he might take my photograph. I said that I would rather he didn’t – which was churlish, because I have...
You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in the United States. After all, you’ll say, aren’t the key American...
I n his account of late capitalism Fredric Jameson describes its cultural logic as if it were a schizophrenic – broken in language, amnesiac about history, in thrall to glossy images,...
P aul Klee drew many different kinds of picture, and the exhibition on at the Hayward Gallery until 1 April, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, arranges them by kind rather than...
‘To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-semitic.’ So said Budd Schulberg, the son of a pioneer film producer, a successful screenwriter and author of the quintessential...
As we go to press at the beginning of the last quarter of February, the phoney spring is over. Mid-January to mid-February was the warmest it’s been since 1659 (which is when records...
O nce again the National Gallery visits the Dutch at home. This time not Vermeer and de Hooch’s Delft but Aelbert Cuyp’s Dordrecht: instead of brick courtyards and side-lit rooms where...
Christopher Wren, England’s best known architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to...
I am in Wellington, where I spent my first twenty years. I have walked, as I used to then, down the hill from Wadestown. The pines are now taller and blacker and the glossy mounded foliage of...
The critics can be pushed only so far. Having fallen over themselves to praise John Bayley for Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, they were kind, rather, about Iris and The Friends. But now –...
Nearly everyone is happy with the Press Complaints Commission except people with complaints about the press. Governments like it because it provides them with a handy bolthole whenever demands to...
D avid Sylvester, who contributed regularly to this paper, died last June. People who worked with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert...
A t the height of Steve McQueen’s fame in 1968, after a run of huge box-office successes – The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder...
The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1784). A single large and not much known picture by Goya, The Family of the Infante Don Luis, on loan from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Parma, is on...
In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells’s Martians had the good sense to make landfall near Woking. ‘Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after, about midnight,...
I n the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just a walk or a...