A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint...
Picabia’s book of writings and drawings, I Am a Beautiful Monster, is wrapped in a brown-bag cover of monsterdom, while George Baker’s book about Picabia, The Artwork Caught by the...
Robert Schumann died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, having committed himself there two years before, following a suicidal plunge into the Rhine near his home in Düsseldorf. He had had many...
I took a look around Harrods last weekend. Barging my way in through a crowd of animal rights protesters, I wondered if I should tell them to try their luck around the corner. Harrods is selling...
Joel and Ethan Coen often look like moviemakers in search of a movie; as if their perfect film were waiting for them out there and they had to do something while they were looking for it. What...
The pictures, Russian and French in about equal numbers, lent for the exhibition From Russia – at the Royal Academy until 18 April – were made in the last quarter of the 19th century...
One’s feelings about having one’s appetite tickled by pictures depicting food are at best ambivalent. Willem Kalf’s mid-17th-century painting in the National Gallery of a...
It seems perfectly clear at first glance: beautiful and ugly are straightforward opposites. Beautiful Cinders, ugly sisters. Beauty, the Beast. Dorian, his portrait. So it’s not surprising,...
Most aesthetic concepts are theological ones in disguise. The Romantics saw works of art as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were...
Books and blogs, if they’re doing their jobs properly, are as different as two kinds of published text can be. For one thing, creating a book takes many months, not to say years, and the...
Lust, Caution is billed as a film about sex and espionage, lots of both, and occasionally it looks like such a work. All its interesting moments, however, are about something else: style,...
‘To my amazement, there were no paintings . . . but only packages, piled one atop another to the height, say, of Picasso . . . And do you know what there was inside?...
There are few enough points of continuity between the official state ideology of Maoist China and the ideology espoused by the country’s leaders today. But the significance of Qin Shi...
In the 1970s and 1980s, journalists and TV producers looking to capture the full extent of Britain’s industrial and manufacturing decline would go to Manchester in search of empty...
Joan Eardley was only 42 when she died in 1963. She was born in England but her life was in Scotland. Two Scottish subjects dominate the current exhibition of her work (at the National Gallery of...
Delicately, like a surgeon baring a pus-filled appendix, the man behind the counter slices a catering-size salami. His customer feeds a sandwich into her mouth, careful not to smudge the...
Divas and, recently, divos are all around us. Late last year, the newspapers and opera websites had a feeding frenzy over the antics of the tenor Roberto Alagna, who had been singing Radames in
Ridley Scott is always a director to watch. This proposition includes watching for things to avoid, especially when he goes for history and costume, as in 1492 and The Kingdom of Heaven. But...