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,...
If you cycle into Central London every day you see a lot of road: tarmac, grit, paving stone, cobble; the skin of the city. Cyclists are supposed to look ahead, and I try to, but as a child I...
In 2015 Fan Jianchuan was invited by the Chongqing government to open a new branch of his eponymous museum chain just outside the vast city. The original, the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in...
Hands, in this world without faces, do an enormous amount of work.
Behind the White House, next to Blair House, is the formidable Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of...
‘The Americans really know how to do things,’ the central character thinks in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), now available in an...
It was June 2004 and I was in the Special Collections section of the Union College Library in Schenectady in upstate New York. About an hour earlier, I had heard one of the librarians telling...
It has been a good year, as these things go, for diversity in London’s galleries. Soul of a Nation, Queer British Art, Rose Wylie: Quack Quack and now Basquiat: Boom for Real have...
The great French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t...
A black and white photograph from 1958 shows Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí on a hot August day in Cadaqués, on the east coast of Spain. The artists are trekking uphill with...
Simon de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck,...
It seems eccentric to say it of a person richer than the queen, but J.K. Rowling is, I think, undervalued. Or rather, she gets credit for the less important things, for being a marketing...