Lana Turner walks out of the shadows into a pool of light then into the shadows again. Into another pool of light and a second set of shadows. She is wearing an overcoat, walking the streets,...
There is no such thing as well-tempered modernism, which is a problem for a genteel art culture like England’s.
As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice....
‘Troubling’: that’s the word chosen by Penelope Curtis, the new director of Tate Britain, in her preface to the catalogue for Migrations, the gallery’s recently opened...
Owen Hatherley understands the dangers of ‘nostalgia for the future’, but he’s too far gone to pull out.
‘Nice story’, Freud says when Jung gives him an account of a patient’s pathology. The tone is amused, but a sense of shock lingers, an ironically disguised disapproval of...
What is the difference between great art and tat?
People who value the power of art to shock have complained that David Shrigley should have been given a solo show in a venue for serious modern art.
Andrea del Castagno was one of the greatest Florentine painters of the Quattrocento. But was he also a murderer?
Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian...
‘I cannot abide fuzzy plants, or plants of a certain texture … Just looking at them sets me off,’ an off-screen male synaesthete complains in Daria Martin’s Sensorium...
Most Valuable, Most Improved, and for least valuable unimprovables, the Spirit Award. Skinny in my T-back, I got Most Valuables. Swimming mostly hurt. My shoulders are still big from this....
Alfred Dickens, the novelist’s brother, wrote a General Board of Health report on the area soon to be occupied by the Olympic athletes, recording that ‘the cholera raged’ and...
The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer...
The plot line is a bit schematic, resolute in its avoidance of swerves and complications. A new movie star is born, an old star fades. Time passes, technology rules, the talkies are here. Still,...
Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son...
‘They’re not going to stop,’ Joe McCarthy said of the Communists. ‘It’s right here with us now. Unless we make sure there’s no infiltration of our government,...
It comes as a surprise to learn that the second artist given a major show at the Museum of Modern Art was Diego Rivera, for when the exhibition opened in December 1931, the 45-year-old Mexican...