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.
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.
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”...
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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Käthe Kollwitz aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ she once remarked. ‘But...
Last year I narrated Pelé’s My Autobiography – yes, I am the queer voice of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. This presented the challenge of voicing problematic and dated views, especially...