The problem with being a dedicated social trouble-maker who has not self-destructed is that, as the decades roll by, the society you wish to irritate gets used to you and even begins to regard...
Coming off Tottenham Court Road, screens, devices, gizmos, you plunge with relief into a street of unexpected, probably miscalculated art galleries, restaurants that change their pitch every time...
Gerhard Richter’s Atlas is on show until 14 March. The walls of the gallery are closely tiled with groups of framed cards of a couple of standard sizes. On them are mounted photographs,...
At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the...
The first painting you see at the James Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York until 25 January is President Elect: a broad headshot of a beaming JFK, manicured fingers with a...
Living without love is like not living at all.Art Pepper, 1958Writing this in San Francisco, having just come back from San Diego and a heroin Christmas at my mother’s. Not that I used any:...
In an art gallery over the last decade you might have happened on one of the following. A room empty except for a stack of identical sheets of paper – white, sky-blue, or printed with a...
Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save...
The Second World War paraphernalia in the Imperial War Museum is not just tanks, guns and half-tracks. There is a sailing dinghy – one of the boats which evacuated soldiers from the...
It is partly because so much appears to be known about William Cobbett (1763-1835) that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or...
The large number of visitors permitted in the tight exhibition space at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris means that it’s hard, without pushing or being pushed, to view many of the...
The steeple of the church of St George, Bloomsbury is an astonishing confection. A square tower rises from the ground to above roof level. It is topped by a little pedimented temple. The temple...
A scene from a concert: on stage, a young Jewish-American folk singer/ songwriter, accompanied only by his own guitar and the harmonica around his neck, with a forceful, nasal voice and...
David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from...
Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...
Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms. ‘Unrealistic’, for example, is not necessarily the same as ‘non-realist’. You can have a work of art which is...
The most notorious American painter of the late 19th century, a dandy who used his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill...
Before Picasso, it is impossible to think of a major European artist of more protean character than Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). By 1580 he had established a high reputation in Haarlem for...