A t the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a two-hour wait will get you ‘priority access’ to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition. It’s available only to friends of the museum,...
T he German painter Jörg Immendorff died in 2007, at the age of 61, after a long period suffering from motor neurone disease. His reputation had been tarnished by a scandal a few years...
W hat does a wedding look like in an Ozu film? Two large hired cars outside an anonymous block of flats. Inside the building, father and elder brother in sleek Western morning suits, younger...
G lobalised cricket – epitomised by the Indian Premier League with its billions, its imported cheerleaders, its shady business deals, its manic marketing – is enmeshed in crisis....
F or anyone wishing to organise an exhibition of his works, Veronese presents a particular challenge. He was exceedingly prolific and many of his best paintings are too large to be moved. He...
W hen 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...
R ichard 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.
O nce 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...
I f 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.
R uins 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...
T he 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...
A ntoni 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....
A sked 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...
P auline 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....