Who scored last? Collision Sport

Gavin Francis, 5 October 2023

Is rugby a participation sport, or an entertainment spectacle? Which should take priority? The newer style of play is making a lot of money for a lot of people, but there is unequivocal evidence that injury...

Read more about Who scored last? Collision Sport

There is a moral here, if we like this sort of thing, and Petzold would no doubt say we are entitled to our liking. That’s what abeyance is about. Self-absorbed people have to learn about the lives of...

Read more about At the Movies: Christian Petzold’s ‘Afire’

At Pallant House: Gwen John

Alice Spawls, 21 September 2023

John had a famous younger brother, Augustus John, and a famous older lover, Auguste Rodin. Her pictures are, on the whole, characterised by restraint of tone and technique. There are not very many of...

Read more about At Pallant House: Gwen John

You are not Cruikshank: Gillray’s Mischief

David Bromwich, 21 September 2023

Society itself is a satirist and a thief; what it steals is the person you are. James Gillray’s mischief was of an unusual sort, at once refined and coarse, and sometimes with an opacity hard to penetrate...

Read more about You are not Cruikshank: Gillray’s Mischief

Divinity Incognito: Elsheimer by Night

Nicholas Penny, 7 September 2023

Although Adam Elsheimer provided miniatures for private and privileged delectation, his work enjoyed an enormous influence, partly because of his close association with a great engraver, Hendrick Goudt,...

Read more about Divinity Incognito: Elsheimer by Night

At the Courtauld: ‘Art and Artifice’

Rosemary Hill, 7 September 2023

The main objection to Georges Seurat’s Nude with Blonde Hair – what makes it ‘one of the most puzzling works in the collection’ – is its ‘poor quality’. But the argument that it isn’t by...

Read more about At the Courtauld: ‘Art and Artifice’

At Wiels: Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Brian Dillon, 10 August 2023

Deciding what to show at Wiels, Chaimowicz wrote to the curator, Zoë Gray: ‘I would like to send you my sitting room.’ The result is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an...

Read more about At Wiels: Marc Camille Chaimowicz

On Richard Mosse

Francis Gooding, 10 August 2023

Richard Mosse seeks what can’t be seen. He employs military or industrial camera technologies sensitive to light spectra invisible to the eye; his subjects are ignored or remote catastrophes.

Read more about On Richard Mosse

For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world around him; he paints not from life but from photographs,...

Read more about Squeegee Abstracts: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic

At the Movies: ‘Barbie’

Michael Wood, 10 August 2023

In​ the middle of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other...

Read more about At the Movies: ‘Barbie’

St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great...

Read more about At the National Gallery: St Francis of Assisi

Drag Race is a sisterhood, and a masterpiece of queer capitalism. RuPaul, a preppy businessman by day, is a figure of superlative glamour in drag – a Black woman comparable in beauty to Naomi Campbell,...

Read more about Diary: Bingeing on ‘Drag Race’

Ernest Cole’s politics were opaque, he didn’t give much away, but his photographs suggest that he saw racism as a more decisive force in South Africa than the structural injustices of capitalism, even...

Read more about Focus, Shoot, Conceal: Apartheid in Pictures

At the Movies: ‘Asteroid City’

Michael Wood, 13 July 2023

The suggestion, I think, is that life as we live it may be largely an affair of props and sets, and Wes Anderson is inviting us not to feel too bad about this possibility. The question ‘Who framed Asteroid...

Read more about At the Movies: ‘Asteroid City’

The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick...

Read more about Cloak and Suit and Slipper: Reviving Hirshfield

Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine...

Read more about Warty-Fingered Klutzburger: ‘Be Mine’

Damaged, unfinished or fragmented works have an appeal of their own (Renaissance artists sometimes deliberately sought this ‘non finito’) and are also prized for what they can teach us about an artist’s...

Read more about At the National Gallery: ‘The Nativity’ Restored

For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about...

Read more about The Reason I Lost Everything: Kamila Shamsie