T o the left of the entrance to The Spanish Civil War: Dreams + Nightmares (the exhibition runs until 28 April) is the Sargent Room. At the moment it contains three big World War One...
David Hockney’s new study, Secret Knowledge, sets out a thesis with vast implications, both for the way we look at Old Master paintings and the way we think about painting’s relation...
Today there are only second acts in American lives. No generation to find itself interestingly lost in Paris; no elegant tribe crowding the lawn with portents of disaster at Gatsby’s...
Fernande Olivier, like Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, sexualised all her relationships with men and served their desires while lamenting that her own were unfulfilled. She lived through her lovers...
You have only to watch a few frames of Apocalypse Now, in either version, to realise you have caught a high point of American filmmaking. The lighting is wonderful, the editing precise and...
T here was, I seem to remember, a TV quiz in which the contestants watched the prizes – toasters, stereos, food-mixers – go by on a conveyer belt. The new British Galleries 1500-1900...
I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork...
In Delirious New York (1978), his ‘retroactive manifesto’ for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas published an old tinted postcard of the city skyline in the early 1930s. It presents the Empire...
P isanello, the subject of an exhibition which can be seen until 13 January at the National Gallery, was admired above any of his contemporaries in the 15th-century Italian Courts, and much...
What do TV presenters and narrators of novels have in common?* Both are to some extent fictional, both need to be not only convincing but liked if they are to be successful. (There are of course...
London: chaos. The Isle of Harris: rock. Visual and auditory interference on all sides. You hear the radio even when it isn’t playing. The shocked and affronted voices. Our eyes are...
B etween its professional beginnings in the middle 1800s and the late years of the century photography was a laborious business, protected by heavy equipment, long exposures and messy chemistry...
A golf course takes up an enormous amount of space, but the anger this creates among paid-up protectors of the countryside is nothing to the rage it can provoke in a ropey golfer. Golf is not the...
‘Let us consider the names given to horses – not ordinary horses . . . but racehorses,’ writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, opening an excursus on equine onomastics in
F rank Auerbach is a serious painter. His retrospective at the Royal Academy, which has given over its main rooms to a show spanning nearly fifty years of his work, is a serious exhibition.1 The...
As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the...
The Big Issue, the magazine sold on the streets by the homeless, is ten years old this month. The next three issues will describe and celebrate its history; the first of these – available...
‘I regret to say that I must interrupt the logical continuity of this article. I have been lunching with some friends in one of the most beautiful houses in a Bloomsbury square, and...