Andrei Tarkovsky made his last two films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, in Italy and Sweden, and never returned to Russia. He died in Paris in 1986, aged 54. He was out of favour with the...
Prints are defined by their reproducibility, but the monotype is self-destructive, its printable design effaced after one or two passes through a press. Since the printmaker neither etches nor...
In January 1939, an itinerant Angolan sent a postcard from the Belgian Congo to a friend back home. ‘Salute my wife,’ he wrote. ‘Tell her that her old husband still has not...
In New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with...
The burglar’s gaze turns exits into entrances, windows into doors, drainpipes into ladders. Burglars see the bits of buildings the architect attempts to conceal. Floors, walls and...
The last time a painting from the Hudson River School – the loose grouping of 19th-century American artists who evoked the placid rural villages and forested tourist destinations upriver...
There appear to be two main rules for superhero films. One is shared with many action movies: there has to be a lot of damage to property. Cars burn, streets are ripped up, tall buildings...
In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan asked Nina Simone how come she wasn’t ‘more active in civil rights’. ‘Motherfucker, I am civil rights,’ she replied.
David Solkin’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared...
It was only in the real-size, forty-piece Fall of Icarus that Picasso escaped from Cubism – from the studio, from ‘viewpoint,’ from proximity and tactility, from the whole spatial and...
When I started work in the Sunday Times newsroom in 1970, my colleagues would sometimes describe the Observer half-admiringly as ‘a writers’ paper’, to be enjoyed for the quality of...
For once the difficult architectural layout of the Barbican Art Gallery works in favour of the current exhibition. Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers,...
The National Portrait Gallery’s Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (until 26 June) displays a small but rich body of works made between 1867 and 1914, focused on...
The places were Philadelphia and New York, the names were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans and a few others, heirs to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, spoken of with awe in every...
For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. Does anyone much like any of her post-Horses...
‘Work … has been a pleasure throughout,’ Pevsner wrote in the introduction to the first edition of Suffolk. ‘The weather was clement, the natives friendly, the scenery and...
The first picture you come across in Tate Modern’s vast and various exhibition Performing for the Camera (until 12 June) is Yves Klein’s arresting and now iconic Leap into the Void...
Late last year, Rangers played host to Hibernian. Both teams are currently in the Scottish Championship, the second tier of Scottish football – after going into administration in 2012...