O ne 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,...
I f 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...
I n 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.
B ehind 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...
‘T he Americans really know how to do things,’ the central character thinks in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), now available in an...
I t 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...
I t 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...
T he 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...
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...
S imon 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,...
I t 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...
I n his biography of the painter Chaïm Soutine, Monroe Wheeler tells the story of Soutine’s obsession with Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing of 1654, which shows his wife, Hendrickje...
T he great detective never rests, and perhaps doesn’t want to, although in Kenneth Branagh’s new film he does express a wish for a day or two off. No such luck, of course,...
I have been trying to forget the shows in London commemorating the Bolsheviks, in particular the Royal Academy’s Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32. But I haven’t been able to: some things,...
T here are two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh...
I n 1850 the government announced yet another delay to the construction of the new Houses of Parliament. ‘I am in a towering rage,’ Charles Barry, the architect of the new...
O n the way into the Rachel Whiteread retrospective at Tate Britain (until 21 January), in the long Duveen Galleries, you come across one hundred translucent coloured blocks, squatting on the...