When Ben Nicholson and Winifred Roberts got married, in 1920, they had everything they wanted: time and leisure to paint in, and enough of Winifred’s family money to travel wherever they...
Richard Hoggart made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor...
Kate Bush has taken on a quite distinct mythic life in our collective dreaming.
Once upon a time there was a place called Europe. All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés...
If you want to pick a quarrel with Cézanne, Cézanne and the Modern at the Ashmolean provides cues. Take his own quarrel with lines. Cézanne walks into the woods with a sheet...
Veronese has a Shakespearean ability to use the sensuous and structural qualities of his medium to make standard materials mutate.
Ruins are unstable things, sometimes physically, culturally almost always. Their appeal as occasions for art is only partly aesthetic; they are the remains of something else, of which they must...
The Italian futurists were hell-bent on modernity, largely because Italy was late to industrialise. Led by the strident Marinetti, these artists, architects, photographers, writers and...
Antoni Tàpies’s monument to Picasso was commissioned by Barcelona City Council. It sits on the edge of Parc de la Ciutadella on the busy, dusty downtown street named for Picasso....
Asked for his response to those critics who saw in The Wolf of Wall Street an undiluted celebration of the bad life – drugs, sex, money, jewels, a very large yacht and expensive suits...
‘There are the Alps,’ Basil Bunting wrote on the flyleaf of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, ‘you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.’ T.J. Clark is an...
‘What does a woman want?’ I still remember my first encounter with the question Freud put to Marie Bonaparte in 1925, just as I recall my inability to stomach its aggressive and...
Pauline Boty, the only prominent female Pop artist among a generation of famous men, was a blonde beauty, described as a ‘goddess’ and likened by contemporaries to Brigitte Bardot....
It was because Bagehot’s mind ranged far beyond the counting house, because he mocked the sluggish minds of City men, that his writings were so exhilarating.
Mies had dreamed of building skyscrapers since the early 1920s when he’d been seduced by images of the thrusting New York skyline.
For much of the time Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave strikes a curiously stately rhythm, as if it didn’t want to be a movie but an art exhibition or a class in design. The frame...
You might think you’re looking at an advent calendar, but there is no Nativity in this stunning set of paintings from the church of Däräsge Maryam in northern Ethiopia. The church...
Charlie Parker’s sad extinction released myriad afterlives: musical colossus, modernist exemplar, contested emblem of racial politics.