Surfaces in pale earth colours – brown, grey and buff – scraped and rescraped until they look like a wall ready for papering. Backgrounds overlaid with strong accents in brown and...
In the United States the flag has the status of a religious icon, a totem. It cannot be carried horizontally or flat, but must always be ‘aloft and free’. There is a protocol for...
James Cuno is currently the director of the Art Institute of Chicago. He used to be the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; before that he was the director of the Harvard...
There are something under a hundred pictures, and more than a hundred faces, in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, at the National Gallery until 18 January. Some of the pictures stick firmly...
About three years ago, with time to kill, I climbed an unlit staircase behind a fire door at the back of the Barbican Centre. There was no one around. With its forty acres of 1960s Brutalist...
There are several excellent reasons for not wanting to make a film based on a book called Blindness, and Fernando Meirelles knows them all. But knowing them, and even treating them as challenges,...
In the second, narrow room of the Tate Modern exhibition Rothko: The Late Series a single canvas fills most of one of the long walls. Rothko, who wanted people to have the experience of being...
Joseph Rykwert is unhappy about the current condition of architecture, the principal subject of his long career as a historian. In the conclusion to The Judicious Eye, he complains that...
Claude Monet’s first breakthrough was not the ‘impression’ of a sunrise that lent its name to a movement but a full-length figure in contemporary dress that he submitted to the...
Frankly, it doesn’t much matter if the players don’t know where they are, so long as the fans are there to welcome them. What these new owners want is a club with a clear sense of identity,...
In 1975, Andy Warhol peered into the future and saw … Damien Hirst? ‘Business Art is the step that comes after Art,’ Warhol wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Not only was...
If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about...
Lovers of the films of Max Ophuls always return to La Ronde (1950). Its intricate, revolving story, visually represented by a highly stylised carousel, is certainly gracefully told. Each...
An exhibition of Osbert Lancaster’s drawings, cartoons, illustrations and set and costume designs, selected by James Knox, will begin at the Wallace Collection on 2 October. Lancaster was a...
In her very first stage appearance Doris Day wet herself. It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red...
Wyndham Lewis’s Modernism refuses a provincial label. His intellectual toughness and taste for self-promotion and polemic were foreign to the amateurishness that, he believed, vitiated...
I’ve been told you can’t judge a book by its cover; and not by its subtitle either, it would seem. Jean Starobinski’s Enchantment presents itself as concerned with ‘the...
The police report hovered, as such documents often do, between literal description and bewilderment, showing the letter of the law to be touchingly at odds with what the felon was up to. He...