On a spring day in New York City in 1960, Grace Hartigan, then 38 years old, took the train uptown. To anyone who saw her on the subway, she wouldn’t have looked like a painter.
‘You’re an idiot.’ On its own that sentence is an insult, but add an emoji and it can seem self-deprecatory, even affectionate. Emoji – just in case you’ve been in...
‘Without you,’ Hugh Hefner said to the Playmates he’d assembled for a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Playboy, ‘I’d have been the publisher of a...
‘We’d all be human if we could,’ a sinister character sings in The Threepenny Opera. His hypocrisy is unmistakable, but the ironic implication may also be right. We...
When a beloved building goes dark, a hole opens in the urban fabric: so it was when the Whitney Museum left its old home on New York’s Upper East Side, constructed by Marcel Breuer in...
Giorgione (c.1477-1510) is unique among famous European painters in that at different periods he has been credited with entirely different pictures. Even today, there is great disagreement...
No one at Oxford, or anywhere else in the UK, talked much about Cecil Rhodes before the protests began. Portraits and statues of dead white men are like air in Oxford, ubiquitous and generally unremarked....
A canvas begun in the autumn of 1848 and finished the following spring is, at four foot eight inches wide, one of the heftier items in Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, an exhibition...
Long before electronic media came up with the phrase, literature had been relegated to the status of preferred ‘content provider’ for films. Bestsellers achieve special ontological...
Eddie Mannix, in the Coen Brothers’ new movie, Hail, Caesar!, is not a devout or informed Catholic but he does like to confess. He’s not doing well with his plan of giving up...
Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban...
Sculpture conventionally does one of two things; it either creates space by carving, or creates volume by modelling. Once the material has been cut back or built up, a statue, as the word...
Like proper myths, Hollywood’s stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements.
‘Angry men and furious machines.’ No verb, no explanation – it is the first line of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943....
I cycled to the Design Museum on my secondhand Carlton: a ten-speed club racer built in Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1979 and later outfitted (plastic mudguards, ugly rack, slightly chunky...
This is a story about two bad boys. One, Julian Assange, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than three years. The other, the artist Ai Weiwei, has done his time in...
Hindsight is a fine thing, and hindsight about a bit of foresight is even better when it comes to storytelling. There was a time when nobody knew anything about what was happening, whatever it...
My friends’ toddler staggered towards the zombies; the zombies staggered towards him. Soon they were among us. Blood congealed around eye sockets; cuts slashed down cheeks; eyes whited out. One...