To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice...
The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits...
Ming Smith often compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look...
There is a tendency to linger on the physical vulnerability and discomfort evoked by Veronica Ryan’s pieces, part of a series called Infection which includes plaster casts of yellowing orthopaedic pillows,...
We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea of a book in virtual rather than physical form, but what happens when the content disappears too? Inevitably, we’re left looking at the frame around it....
At the height of his stardom, long before he became a salad dressing entrepreneur, Newman’s screen presence was more that of a living statue than an actor: a Greek god with a suntan and a side parting....
Cezanne’s private puzzling – just how should masses of lemon and lead white converse? – slips into provocative teasing. No, that plate on the right could hardly have perched in that way on a three-dimensional...
To think of Shakespeare’s plays as safe havens for displaced textual agents from different traditions is to understate the underlying violence of the dislocations they display. But to say that the passage...
Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor...
In our own time, Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie – seems to have vanished as a subject, or perhaps it’s just got better at camouflage. But once you’ve seen Grosz’s...
Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man known as Penguin (aka Marc Hamon) recruited him for the Resistance, he wasn’t interested...
The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be. Or closer...
If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously...
No American reporter had been expelled from the Reich until Thompson received a hand-delivered letter from the Gestapo that accused her of offending ‘national self-respect’, rendering them unable to...
Right up until her death in 1992 Mitchell remained committed to what she liked to call ‘AEOH’ – Abstract Expressionist Old Hat. The recent retrospective of her work, on view in Paris until 27 February,...
Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion of movement – were a wonder whose spell was cast by speed; and speed was what the slapstick cinematic chase both celebrated and...
The myth of Delius’s individualism may once have been a useful way of understanding his music. Positioning him as a man outside of his time, uninterested in and unanswerable to his surroundings, made...
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls,...