Marilyn Monroe’s image, after Warhol, is still encoded with a vulnerability we instantly recognise, which makes us want to save her or explain her all over again. The real Marilyn has been dust...
Baselitz did not make overtly political art. He felt that what mattered in painting existed on a deeper level than subject or style. His ‘degenerate’ work was not only a means of compensating...
Screwballs aren’t miserabilist-humanist comedies about learning to revel in imperfection; they’re comedies of fantasy and will. With enough conviction, craziness starts to make sense.
Sid Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new country’,...
Beneath the whimsy and the wit, Agnès Varda’s films were motivated by contradiction and critique. She said she was always looking for ‘the cliché and what’s inside the...
Eighty years on, Dead of Night stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the cultural historical implications. The absence of references to the war only makes...
‘A psalm consoles the sad, restrains the joyful, tempers the angry, refreshes the poor and chides the rich man to know himself,’ wrote Niceta of Remesiana, a fourth-century bishop from what...
In 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared that too much was made of him already. More than fifty years later he is still...
Caxton’s early interest in print was probably commercial rather than technical, that of a publisher rather than an inventor. But his interest in literature ran deep, not only as a reader but also...
Meursault, in Camus’s novel, speaks of the ‘absurd’ life he leads. He also says: ‘It’s common knowledge that life is not worth living.’ A man who killed another man...
Willem De Kooning’s Suburb in Havana is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants...
Printmaker, portraitist, landscape artist, theatre designer and illustrator, William Nicholson slips through the fingers of art historians. This exhibition explores the Venn diagram of his career...
Rather than the manifestos and self-conscious rejection of inherited tradition seen in European art, Nigerian modernism – insofar as one can generalise about such a heterogeneous period –...
The notion of the Great Composer – the individual genius, whose inimitable music is an expression of a singular mind – still holds sway. By contrast, the men and women who composed the music discussed...
More has probably been written about The Ambassadors than about any other work by Holbein. Is the painting a commentary on the religious divisions threatening to rip apart Christendom in the early 1530s?...
Time is embedded in the way Mark Jenkin works – not just the occasional resurrection but the hand-cranked cameras and hand-processed film. His method involves hearing the fractions of a second ticking...
The careers of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Maria Cosway required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn...
In 1983, Brian Wilson told a reporter: ‘I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.’ This boy-child’s story has recognisable stages: he...