What you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not...
West Ham fans tend to think that what happens at their club says something about the state of English football. It’s an illusion born of a summer afternoon 52 years ago when West Ham players provided...
Perched on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small...
More than a hundred years ago new technologies transformed the aesthetic field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and...
Currently on view at the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas is a show whose high ambitions gradually unfold from its title. First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone (until 28 April) has in its...
Jim Ede had been living abroad – first Tangier, then the Loire – when he found himself ‘dreaming of the idea of somehow creating a living place where works of art could be...
In his speech accepting this year’s Oscar for best director – The Shape of Water also won the Oscar for best picture – Guillermo del Toro offered a kind of parody of the mode...
When filming began, Nicholas Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it...
Sharing isn’t always caring. One thing we do know for sure is that huge numbers of us have handed over our own memories to a corporation, and that it wants us to remember. For now, only what we were...
The commune of Gurs in the foothills of the Pyrenees is famous for its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A...
Art et Liberté was a movement that came into being in 1938 in Cairo. It was affiliated to Surrealism through contact with André Breton in Paris, and shared Surrealism’s...
For nearly two hundred years palaeoart has been a playground wherein tyrannosaurids, plesiosaurs and their fellows have not only illustrated scientific knowledge, but acted as scaled and feathered proxies...
With her high cheekbones and her flaxen hair, Joni Mitchell emerged in the late 1960s as some kind of hippy Venus with an overbite. She was the personification of the New Woman, liberated by...
Few painters have seen their reputations rise and fall as dramatically as Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. In his lifetime he was considered a master throughout Europe. Gautier ranked his etchings...
A middle-aged man looks insistently at a young woman. He doesn’t speak. He is smiling slightly, playing with her, but also seeking to trouble her. After a moment she says: ‘If...
Having lost five children shortly after birth, Mozart’s parents had their new baby christened the morning after he was born on 27 January 1756. Leopold, Wolfgang’s father, was a...
Today any sheet of paper that contains so much as a rough sketch by Michelangelo or a line of his very distinctive handwriting has acquired a cachet that makes it almost like a religious relic.
One night in 1939, 16-year-old Sam Phillips jumped into a ‘big old Dodge’ with his older brother and a few friends a little after midnight and set out to drive from Florence,...