Pockets, like novels, can enclose a story about the lost and found. Just as characters in 18th-century fiction are often begged to provide the histories of their lives and adventures, so too they may...
The story of Emil Nolde's opposition to the Third Reich, which informed his pictures for so many viewers, is a fantasy with its own basis in nationalism.
Of the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the...
In the first room of the Nam June Paik retrospective at Tate Modern (until 9 February), an 18th-century carved wooden Buddha sits on an oblong plinth. Facing him is an image of his own face,...
Succession is often said to be ‘about the Murdochs’, and I’ve heard that the pilot was explicitly about the family, but all the lawyers in the room fainted and then woke up screaming...
To leaf through NeoRealismo feels a bit like being inside a Neorealist movie.
Gwydir Street in Cambridge, just off the appealingly scruffy Mill Road, is a narrow street of Victorian terraced houses. In the 1980s my secondary school English teacher lived there: he would...
The film begins with some anxious jokes about the changing times. The ancien régime is mentioned, meaning both the political order before the Revolution and yesterday’s state of...
All the change is good, but not if we lose the plot altogether; there is no need for MoMA to mix and match to the extent that Tate Modern does.
Biographies of artists often read like legends of heroes. Vasari preferred his Renaissance masters to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor...
One way to think about Debussy’s music is as an invitation to attention: at its most rapt, his music seems itself to listen, and the act of listening to which it draws us becomes the value of which...
Amalia Pica’s installation Semaphores, currently on display behind King’s Cross Station, consists of three brightly coloured signalling devices, one on the ground, next to the...
The catacombs under the Left Bank were originally part of a complex of stone quarries, built over as Paris spread during the 13th century. By the 16th century subsidence had become a serious...
After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that Lucian had made, to show...
In 1979 the makers of Alien, Stalker and, it might also be said, Apocalypse Now invented worlds we thought we wanted to know about but couldn’t inhabit. Domestic quarrels and the musical...
So much is done in Delacroix by purely formal means, coldly, with a kind of monstrous painterly calculation, to spell out what pain and fear truly feel like. Look at the geometry – the bare linear...
In 1897 or 1898, Edouard Vuillard gave Félix Vallotton one of his most important paintings. Vuillard’s Large Interior with Six Figures appears in two of Vallotton’s...
‘If you have a taste for travel you can visit the town of Weimar,’ Jorge Semprún wrote in 2001: It’s the town of Goethe, isn’t it? Charming. There are traces of...