The collaboration between Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo, the theme of the beautiful if rather didactic exhibition now at the National Gallery, is one of the strangest episodes in the...
Many, perhaps most, representations of crime, whether the event is supposed to occur in fact or in fiction, give the impression of being about something else. Something instead of crime or something as...
Frogs could be heard croaking, one hot spring day in 1688, in a ditch beside a meadow where Antoni van Leeuwenhoek liked, as he put it, to wander ‘for my amusement’. Peering down,...
At the start of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders...
If anything justifies the use of the word ‘iconic’ to mean an instantly recognisable image with emotive associations it is representations of Churchill. The cigar, the V for...
‘Should the street be considered one of the fine arts?’ Fernand Léger asked in 1928. He was thinking of the objects displayed in Parisian shop windows. Others have been more...
Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is too poised and immaculate for its own good, but full of disturbing undercurrents all the same. Of course, since the film has just won the director...
That’s where the current last London seems to be: riding the crest of a slump. That madness of quitting Europe, burning our bridges, starving hospitals of funds, is part of a suicide-note delirium....
The photographer Sally Mann tells a story about being at a dinner party with Cy Twombly – the two were friends from their hometown of Lexington, Virginia. ‘He was writing...
An enormous queue of well-dressed men and women formed at Tate Britain on the opening night of the Hockney exhibition in early February. It inched forward, a few more guests at a time; at the...
The week before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more...
The word ‘Hogarthian’ first appeared in print in 1744, in a translation of La Fontaine’s The Loves of Cupid and Psyche. By this time Hogarth had become well known, in...
Born to Italian shopkeepers in Edinburgh in 1924, Eduardo Paolozzi was a key member of the Independent Group (IG) of artists, architects, curators and critics formed in London in the early...
On 27 December 1950, 66 years ago, at the age of 66, the German émigré painter Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on the corner of Central Park West and 69th Street,...
Twenty years on from the first Trainspotting movie, and Irvine Welsh still cannae act to save his life. In the original, he took the part of Mikey Forrester, the Muirhouse-based purveyor of...
Moonlight is full of amazing silences, at times almost a silent movie. Until the last section, when it is so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in...
Paul Nash is as close as we come, many think, to having a strong painter of the English landscape in the 20th century. The uncertainties built into the wording here are part of the point: Nash...
All wars always produce phony atrocity stories – along with real atrocities. But in the Syrian case fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen...