In Camden

Inigo Thomas, 5 December 2024

In no sense was Frank Auerbach a topographical artist. Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent and the entrance to his studio were his only external frames of reference from the 1960s. Auerbach’s London...

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The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing intervention. Both of these bear an at...

Read more about At the Sainsbury Centre: Ayahuasca Art

The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.

Read more about A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due

At the Movies: ‘Anora’

Michael Wood, 21 November 2024

The first hour of Anora, Sean Baker says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if we are ready to reconsider the meanings of romance and comedy.

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At Kenwood House: Curtain Pictures

Elizabeth Goldring, 24 October 2024

Before William Larkin’s identity was established and his oeuvre began to be reconstructed, paintings such as those in the Suffolk Collection were often referred to as “carpet and curtain pictures”...

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Why Twice? Fire at the Mack

Rosemary Hill, 24 October 2024

The tone of the Glasgow School of Art has been one of victimhood, as if the fires were disasters for which the school itself had no responsibility. This, combined with its seeming indifference to the effect...

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At the Louisiana: On Chaïm Soutine

Michael Hofmann, 24 October 2024

Soutine straddles a great generational and stylistic gulf in art history, between the cosy 1900s of Post-Impressionist Montmartre and the drip of Pollock, the shock of Bacon, the organic tubular forms...

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‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic...

Read more about Prophetic Stomach: Aby Warburg’s Afterlives

At the Movies: ‘Megalopolis’

Michael Wood, 24 October 2024

Megalopolis has a beginning and an end, in that order, and more middles than the director or the audience can cope with. Some are interesting and plainly intentional, some are gestures towards an old-fashioned...

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Scoops and Leaks: On Claud Cockburn

Neal Ascherson, 24 October 2024

To the end of his life, Claud Cockburn stuck to two core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority. But it was his second core belief that really drove...

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At the Movies: ‘Only the River Flows’

Michael Wood, 26 September 2024

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options...

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It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...

Read more about Spaces between the Stars: Kubrick Does It Himself

Diary: Lucian Freud’s Sitters

Celia Paul, 12 September 2024

The loosening up of Freud’s painting occurred while his second marriage was breaking up. He would never marry again. He needed to free himself from emotional ties and, at the same time, he wanted to...

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Arthur Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He made music for every possible mood: something to play during the snoozy afternoon, a 12-inch to light up the dancefloor...

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Early in her career Simone Biles was described in ways that made clear that she wasn’t the shape of the supposed ideal gymnast; she was always ‘powerful’ or ‘muscular’. ‘She has no great performance,...

Read more about Different for Girls: On Women’s Gymnastics

I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Sophie Lewis, 1 August 2024

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

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Roni Horn’s attention here is fixed on something more indefinite than ordinary, obvious reflexivity about image-making and artifice, something that slips between images, between moments, between words...

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Guardainfantes: Sartorial Diplomacy

Nicola Jennings, 1 August 2024

Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...

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