I didn’t make it to the huge Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco but if the very large catalogue is anything to go by the show was obviously …...
Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have the one belonging to Paris Hilton.
Titian: His Life is – not surprisingly, considering its great length – really about Titian’s ‘life and times’, and often seems to be more about the latter than the...
Silent, heavy doors open on a line of dense and minatory charcoal drawings, linked like coal trucks, and arranged on the floor in a provisional order – I visited before the all-encompassing...
The two characters at the centre of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, seen in a restored print at the BFI Southbank, are so nasty to each other in their half-polite way that you long for them...
The best-known photograph of Eileen Gray was taken in 1926 by Berenice Abbott, whose sitters had lately included Cocteau, Gide and Joyce. Gray was 48, but looks younger: her hair is cropped, and...
The Festival of Britain in 1951 marked the centenary of the Great Exhibition. It came six years after the end of the Second World War and three before the end of rationing. By this time Barbara...
Successful artists are usually attracted to major cities, where reputations are most easily made and commissions most abundant. Barocci was a conspicuous exception. Born in the 1530s in the...
Joseph Losey’s The Servant hasn’t lost any of its mystery over the years since 1963; it might even have gained a bit. This is odd because the film seems in many ways so obvious, giving...
Thirty-four men, 20 of them standing, 14 sitting, spread across four paintings and 21 years. Almost all are sombrely dressed, in the black frock coat worn by bourgeois and artist alike in the...
A small number of aristocratic families are contending for power in Westeros, an island with a cold north, warm south and ferocious barbarians across the seas to the east.
In 1857, when Cézanne was 18, the government lawyer prosecuting Madame Bovary as an affront to public decency declared that the novel was ‘a painting admirable from the point of view...
Everything in the British Museum’s show confirms the picture we have of hunter-gatherer society’s inwardness with the ways of wild beasts.
It’s too late for Justin Bieber to be a regular kid who turns up on time and poses meekly for the camera.
Nothing in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew quite lives up to its first few minutes, but getting anywhere near them is quite an achievement. And this static,...
Meades is our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie, ‘making-strange’.
Henry VI had an unusually long reign, but on most counts a singularly unfortunate one. He lost the lands gained in France by his father Henry V, he became embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, his...
‘The Luncheon’, a canvas three feet nine inches high and five feet wide, dominates the opening gallery of the Royal Academy’s exhibition Manet: Portraying Life (until 14 April)....