Martians have been invading us for longer than most of us can remember; but when did we invade them? Or when did we become certain that there were no Martians to invade or be invaded by? The...
Among the more modestly engaging works in Ai Weiwei’s spectacular and somewhat dispiriting exhibition at the Royal Academy (until 13 December) is a framed wire coathanger, stretched and...
Conceived in Moscow in 2005 as a film about the great Soviet physicist Lev Landau, Dau turned into something much stranger.
Castrati could shift and transform themselves. Everybody, it seemed, wanted them, but for different things.
‘Ever go to the movies?’ the gangster says to the waiter in a small-town diner. ‘Once in a while,’ the waiter replies. ‘You ought to go to the movies more,’...
‘I wake early, think; dress me, think; walk, think; come back to my chamber, think; and as I allow no thoughts unworthy to be written, I write.’ There is a clock-like rhythm...
That marvellous line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William...
In the final pages of The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald imagined ‘the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their...
Agnes Martin’s lifelong dedication to simplicity of mind was perhaps made easier (it was certainly not impeded) by the faint trace of simple-mindedness in her nature. Had she not had...
I wish someone would explain why yet another major Tate Britain exhibition has come under critical fire. The latest round of brickbats started flying a good six months before Barbara...
No one did colour more blatantly and more unexpectedly than Van Gogh.
Portrait painting requires stillness. What, for the subject, is it like to be still? As far as one can tell, the gentleman facing Richard Dadd in 1853 had nothing that he wished to project:...
Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful.
In a memo about Touch of Evil, Orson Welles asked Universal Studios to pay attention to the ‘brief visual pattern’ he had drawn, suggesting improvements for the film. This was...
Sonia Delaunay – who designed clothes worn by Gloria Swanson and Nancy Cunard, whose bold zigzag textiles and liveried Citroën graced the cover of the January 1925 issue of Vogue,...
Throughout Back to Black, her glottal-stopped London accent eerily combines with a Motown swing in the phrasing, each element undercutting and enhancing the other to make a smooth-rough-smooth sound...
‘One of the most baffling things about America,’ Amiri Baraka wrote in 1963, ‘is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’...
On the field of Waterloo the corner that is for ever England is the Château-Ferme de Hougoumont. Here, on 18 June 1815, 2500 British soldiers held off 12,500 French, nearly a quarter of...