Howard Hodgkin has finished a new painting. It is called Summer Rain, and is painted with oils on a framed wooden panel, about two metres in length and just over one metre high. At the centre a...
There was a time within living memory when a survey of Klee’s painting like the one at Tate Modern – 17 rooms, 130 works – would have been the event of the season (it’s on...
Alex Ferguson is a conspiracist, which is not quite the same as being a conspiracy theorist.
Deborah Kerr had been around by the time she came to her role in The Innocents (1961). In the movies, I mean. She had been in love with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, swooned over Cary...
When the queen came to Ireland in May 2011 a number of the great, good and merely deserving were locked in the 1937 reading room of Trinity College Dublin for two hours without their mobile...
‘It’s easy not to be a Nazi when no Hitler is around,’ Hans-Jürgen Syberberg commented in his filmed interview with the aged, unashamed Führer-familiar Winifred Wagner...
The American artist Christopher Wool’s large abstract paintings are often beautiful, but they are so emptied of content that it is at first hard to know what to make of them. For the first...
There is the male gaze in art; and then, beyond that, there is the Freudian gaze.
Silhouettes are polite, a parlour art, practised in gemütlich Vienna and Berlin among families who also formed quartets and played the piano; they were often made by the same accomplished...
‘My Nazis are different,’ Ernst Lubitsch said in reply to critics who hadn’t liked his film To Be or Not to Be. The critics thought he was failing to be funny about what...
A Daumier lithograph of 1857 shows a marble statue on a plinth coming alive in the midst of the busy Salon. She clenches her fists and bawls in sheer frustration. No one hears her. No one sees...
Until recently nothing about my experience of knitting or anything I had noticed about it suggested that it might become a cultural ‘thing’. Certainly no sign that I would ever find...
This country has changed, and what’s happening in sport is a way of measuring that change.
‘I have come to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the dance, to bring the knowledge of the beauty and holiness of the human body through its expression of movements.’
Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel – born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, brought up in Italy, uprooted by war to Yugoslavia, and from there to...
Many critics and viewers have felt that Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s best film since Match Point. The accompanying implication is that the intervening works – seven movies, starting...
In the fierce critiques that the charismatic thinkers of postwar France directed at each other – Lévi-Strauss v. Sartre, Foucault v. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari v. Lacan, to pick...
Portraits – likenesses of living persons – began to appear in China about 2500 years ago. The tradition may be long, but the breadth and scale of the genre are even more striking,...