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 structure...
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...
Reviewing the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, Alfred Wolff began his article in Le Figaro: ‘Five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman.’
Despite being the most imaginative Spanish painter of the 15th century, and the only one to master the illusionistic techniques pioneered by Jan Van Eyck, Bartolomé Bermejo’s small...
It was so quiet that night, we learn in Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s book about the Manson murders of 1969, that you could hear the ice rattling in cocktail shakers all the way...
‘My art is formalist,’ Frank Bowling wrote in 1988, ‘and my experience is that of a black artist.’ What might appear an opposition between formalist concerns and lived...
The Lee Krasner retrospective at the Barbican (until 1 September) is not to be missed. It is rare these days to be given a chance to assess the seriousness and beauty of the best Abstract...
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one...
Tom Wolfe lived round the corner from the Metropolitan Museum, at 21 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison. A mahogany elevator went to the sitting room of his 14th-floor apartment, much...
When the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with...
The sculptor David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is...
Miners in the Snow (1880) was Vincent van Gogh’s first pictorial declaration of intent. Unable to hold down work in the family picture trade or as a preacher, he was persuaded by his...
Comics emerged in Japan ‘at least a century earlier than in Europe or the Americas’, according to the catalogue for the Manga exhibition at the British Museum (until 26 August)....
A recurring effect in the films of Agnès Varda, especially her documentaries, is a kind of hesitation between photography and moving pictures. A shot looks like a still – the...
You enter Mike Nelson’s installation The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain’s latest commission for its Duveen Galleries (until 6 October), through a pair of wooden swing doors salvaged...
A voiceover on the CBS evening news of 20 October 1982 described the American artist Keith Haring: ‘He stalks the New York City subways waiting for his chance to strike. When the...