Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) was an architect. More important, he was also a painter of architectural fantasies and reconstructions of historical architecture. These are precisely drawn, dramatically...
‘When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ This sturdy piece of advice becomes a refrain in Spike Lee’s new movie, Inside Man, where it is ludicrously literalised...
If you had taken a walk in Paris last autumn, you might have come across grinning cats graffitied on walls and buildings. The person responsible for this was Chris Marker: cats play an important...
I have, most mornings, been keeping track of two construction sites. The Brunswick Centre in WC1 is being refurbished. It opened in 1972 and is the closest thing you will get outside a picture...
Michelangelo’s red-chalk study from life for the Sistine Chapel Creation of Adam is one of ninety or so sheets to be seen at the British Museum until 25 June. This drawing triumphantly...
Helen Gardner’s benevolently dictatorial Art through the Ages was published in 1926, and remained the pre-eminent survey for American undergraduates until 1962, when H.W. Janson’s
Anonymous city, handheld camera, actors who scarcely seem to be acting: we may think we know where we are, more or less. This is surely the New Wave by way of Neo-Realism, early Truffaut chasing...
The police could reasonably be charged with making decisions based on speculation rather than fact – they speculated that Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist, for example, when in fact he was...
Follow the history of Italian painting and you see saints, the holy family, mythical heroes and heroines, attendant angels, putti, ladies in waiting and men at arms hustled along by tides of...
He thought they looked like two soft-boiled eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth...
David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and...
The pleasures of piety are infinite and exquisite and probably nowhere more easily had these days than in the rock ’n’ roll business, or in Hollywood. On record, and on stage, and up...
The subtitle Hilary Spurling has given to the second half of her biography of Henri Matisse is upbeat and triumphant, in line with orthodox interpretations of the painter’s career:...
For the duration of the Dan Flavin retrospective (until 2 April), the large foyer through which you enter the Hayward Gallery is bisected by a barrier of identical rectangular units, each mounted...
In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart...
The designer Calum Storrie has just published a book called The Delirious Museum.* His starting point is the belief that the museum should be a continuation of the street – as easy to...
At the Wallace Collection, Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time has been taken down into the basement. It can be found there until 5 February, holding a position of honour in Dancing to...
If it is too often said about Diane Arbus that she photographs freaks, it does at least suggest that we know what normal people are like, what people look like when they are not odd. It is...