Henri Rousseau said that Cézanne couldn’t draw, which seems a bit unfair when, by the standards of the academy, he couldn’t draw either. But there is certainly a sense in which...
The official euphemism for it sounds like the title of a Tom Clancy thriller, or a straight-to-video 1980s action movie starring Chuck Norris. The practice itself sounds like something that might...
The inexhaustible appeal of the palaces that line the Grand Canal in Venice owes much to their variety, of materials, textures, colour and relief, as well as period and style. But we cannot miss...
In the United States, there has been a lot of serious academic research – and some not so serious – into the curious phenomenon of the Hot Hand. In all sports, there are moments when...
They were friends, companions, painters-in-arms committed to what was, at the start of the 20th century, the newest and most provoking form of art. Braque was just the younger, but there was...
It’s the time of year when the kinds of thing that are done with light are very like those which, if done with a spray-can, would have boys up in front of the magistrates. Above Regent...
Lady Elizabeth Foster sits beneath a tree and avoids our gaze, lost, it seems, in thought. Behind her the Italian countryside is bathed in a warm autumnal light that sets off the delicate white...
Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy...
Jeff Wall’s Mimic appears to be a documentary photograph. A tough man walks down the street, girlfriend in tow, and exchanges threatening glances with a passer-by. In Vancouver in 1982,...
It was Ruskin who flung down the challenge in the last of his ‘seven lamps’. The style of architecture a nation picks to build in does not matter, he says. It can be Classic,...
The emperors in question in the exhibition China: The Three Emperors 1662-1795 (at the Royal Academy until next April) are Kangxi (ruled 1662-1722), Yongzheng (1723-35) and Qianlong (1736-95)....
In some Eastern mystical traditions there is a route to enlightenment called ‘the Path of Blame’. The idea is to abandon any outward or inward claim to superiority, to disdain the...
Bill Deedes is justly celebrated as a nice man and an English archetype, the sort of character Ian Carmichael used to play in Ealing comedies: Woosterish, emollient, never standing on his rank,...
You don’t know America if you don’t know the Jane Fonda cult. Or rather, the anti-Fonda cult. At places where soldiers or former soldiers congregate, there’ll be stickers of her...
‘Cornfield by Moonlight, with the Evening Star’, c.1830. Samuel Palmer had one pocket in his coat for a sketchbook and one for Milton. He recalled the years he was living in...
In a show earlier this year on Channel 4, a downtrodden-looking woman was exhibited to members of the public who were asked to guess her age. When, as invariably they did, they overestimated it,...
‘An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?’ Roy Bland asks George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)....
Viktor Popkov, ‘Builders of the Bratsk Hydro-electric Power Station’ (1960-61). With every blockbuster, the Guggenheim prompts suspicion: ‘How did it get the loot, and to...