T his has been a rich time to explore 19th-century Scandinavian painting. Six years ago London and Edinburgh shared a revelatory show of Christen Købke (1810-48); while in 2014-15 the...
P eople now talk about big drama serials the way they used to talk about classic novels. If there’s one you haven’t caught up with you feel embarrassed, and you might ask yourself,...
‘T here is a touch of Shylock in this,’ John Kerrigan says of a moment in King Lear. There are touches of Shylock in many places outside The Merchant of Venice, and indeed outside...
Certain changes came to every kind of country house. At Hatfield there were alarming blue sparks and at Woburn some guests groped about in the dark, having no idea how it worked. The Duke of Bedford...
T he exhibition Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-79 (until 29 August), concise, intelligently installed, with something of the clarity and balance of a well-designed book, is an important...
A ndrei 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...
P rints 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...
I n 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...
I n 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...
T he 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...
T he 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...
T here 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.
D avid 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...
F or 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,...
T he 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...