A nselm Kiefer first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue...
I t’s easy to see why Richard Tuttle’s work has a tendency to rile people – in particular people who insist on believing that sculpture, even if it no longer needs to be...
W alking from the Bastille to the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris a few weeks ago, I was thinking how swiftly the last few decades have taken their revenge on the past. The spectacle that...
C onstable , as the V&A’s press release puts it, is ‘Britain’s best-loved artist’, and that in a way is the problem. (Constable: The Making of a Master is at the...
Warning: Even more spoilers than usual. ‘O ne can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell wrote in The World Viewed, ‘the one working...
O f all the 19th-century innovations disparaged by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘invented traditions’, the white wedding must rank alongside clan tartans as the most enduring, a convention now...
I n 1973 , when George Balanchine was asked by his biographer Bernard Taper to appraise the previous decade of his life, he replied: ‘It’s all in the programmes.’ He meant...
T o make a DIY tear-gas mask first cut the bottom off a large plastic bottle. Then turn it upside down and cut away a tall U-shaped area big enough to put your face into. Get a dust mask, soak...
In the spring of 1965, on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down.
A t the centre of a wide shot, near the centre of the film, stands Philip Seymour Hoffman: scruffy, genial, large, mildly enigmatic. He is in a city park, trees all around him, leaves beneath...
It is as if the wildly inflated claim that Richard Wilson ‘transformed’ European landscape painting can only be given even a touch of credibility by passing him off as a Londoner, or at least...
O n 16 October 1940 the house in Tavistock Square in which Virginia Woolf had lived for 15 years was destroyed by a bomb. The first image in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition...
London’s population is near its peak, its skyline mangled by ‘the erection of tall buildings, especially if they are of eccentric or self-promoting “iconic” design’.
H ow many Maleviches were there? Though renowned as a pioneer of abstraction, especially for the stark geometry of his Suprematist canvases, Kazimir Malevich worked in many styles over the...
The secret beating heart of the dream office is the stationery cupboard, the ideal kind, the one that opens to enough depth to allow you to walk in and close the door behind you.
M odern art was born into a market economy, and by the early 20th century it could no longer ignore its commodity status. While some artists sought to escape this condition through...
W e know a gratifying amount about William Byrd, partly thanks to quite recent archival rediscoveries, and Kerry McCarthy splendidly and concisely presents it all in this intelligent and...
By the time he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: he had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it.