In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of...
In October 1951 one of the biggest celebrities of British radio entertainment went missing in the course of a railway journey from London to Leeds. His disappearance coincided with Labour’s...
The last decade has seen the emergence of a new kind of film industry in Nigeria. The results are known as ‘home movies’ – they are shot straight onto video and sold direct to...
Objects from Africa displayed in galleries leave us bemused. We hesitate to use the word ‘art’ – this is not Giorgione or the Barbizon School or Howard Hodgkin – and...
Imagination must take the strain when facts are few. As information about the domestic life of polygamous Oriental households was fragmentary, 17th, 18th and 19th-century European writers and...
Official art has a bad name, yet the pictures commissioned in Britain to record the two world wars were often as good, or better, than anything else the artists did. The paintings Stanley Spencer...
If you are willing to define what you mean by it, the idea of progress in the arts is useful. Take Titian’s portraits. Whether or not those who first saw them understood that a new way of...
The turn of one century calls up others, and 2000 was no exception. Museum shows devoted to Style 1900 or Art Nouveau were on view in London, Paris, New York and other cities. It all looked long...
‘Sounding off’ in the column of that name in last Sunday’s Observer (we go to press on 22 March), Melvyn Bragg – novelist, broadcaster, Controller of Arts Programmes at...
George Orwell saw the patriotism of the British working class as an almost unconscious link with the middle and upper classes: ‘Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even the...
Illustrators of the Divine Comedy find it hard to graduate from Hell, easy going for all the arts, to Paradise, which can look dreary by comparison. The Inferno, after all, is of the earth...
‘Confrontation 2’, 1988. In June 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that it had acquired a series of 15 paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter,...
‘A Billet outside Paris’ (1894) by Anton von Werner That the 19th-century paintings from the Berlin Nationalgalerie should be exhibited at the National Gallery, London (which is,...
Unmounted and unframed, all the Rembrandt prints in the exhibition at the British Museum and all the drawings from Goya’s private albums at the Hayward Gallery – a few hundred sheets...
It’s 5 a.m. and we are bundled up like Sherpas in our boots and sheepskins, boarding the plane to Utah with a contingent of young New Yorkers with pony tails talking into cellphones and...
The party was a success. Wordsworth was not too much on his dignity, Lamb was not too drunk. The talk was of Milton and Shakespeare, Voltaire and Newton. Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton had ‘destroyed...
Travelling to Paris recently, I was surprised to see advertisements for ‘Joséphine Baker, Music-hall et paillettes’, an exhibition at the Espace Drouot-Montaigne commemorating...
Sketch for ‘Study the Old but Create the New’, c.1919, by Varvara Stepanova. Ephemerality shows its sweet sad face when the yellowing edges of books you remember buying, and of...