People weren’t walking out in droves from the suburban cinema in which we saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master because there weren’t droves there: just perhaps eight...
Tom Phillips, who was born in 1937, is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel’, which was reviewed by Adam Smyth in the issue of...
For the past decade or so Tino Sehgal has been making museum-bound work that flexes definitions of ‘work’ and ‘museum’, and threatens to flummox that frequently harried...
The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow was reopened on 2 August by Chris Robbins, leader of Waltham Forest Council, who pronounced its refurbishment ‘truly stunning’. He said how...
You could mount an exhibition entitled ‘The Moment of Edvard Munch’. It would focus on the Norwegian who first hit Paris in 1885, aged 21, and who, energised by his immersion in...
The Owl Man represented raw nature against the pasteurised alternative: traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s Wagnerian lightshow.
The Lodger (1926) was Alfred Hitchcock’s third film, following The Pleasure Garden (1925) and the lost Mountain Eagle (also 1926). He made six more silent films before turning to sound. He...
Tottenham Hotspur was the first football club to be floated, in 1983. I asked the FA why it had allowed Spurs to form a holding company. It hadn’t been an issue, I was told. The top clubs’...
The Vollard Suite is an entertainment. The hundred etchings Picasso produced between 1930 and 1937, which at some point became a set to be sold together, are – for want of a better word...
Stare long enough into the void, Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, and the void stares back at you. The trouble with nothing, no matter an artist or writer’s aspiration to the zero...
In 1974 Ian Berry won a bursary from the Arts Council to photograph ‘the English’. He’d already made his name in South Africa as the only photographer to record the Sharpeville...
I was feeling lonely and somewhat deracinated so the first week of June I flew from London to New York. I bought new shoes and walked around like a tourist: on the High Line, over the Brooklyn...
At noon on 7 January 1779 the British merchant ship Westmorland, en route from Livorno to England, was captured by two French warships off the Spanish coast. France having joined the War of...
If we leave aside some notes and references at the back, Zona seems to close, appropriately, with a description of the end of a film: ‘her eyes, her watching eyes, and her face and head,...
The Bauhaus stank of garlic. Alma Mahler, the wife of its founder and director Walter Gropius (and the ex-wife of Gustav), found the smell intolerable. She refused to eat the ‘obligatory...
The Roland Mouret Galaxy dress was first shown in 2005 and immediately became a defining shape of its time. Partly, the dress was so successful because it was strict and yet curve-friendly,...
Hirst is a natural allegorist, a lover of vanitas images – a clear case of once a Catholic.
Ridley Scott says his new film, Prometheus, is not a prequel to his 1979 Alien. It just has ‘certain strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak’. Fans of the first movie and its...