The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate...
Brought up Jewish and soccer-loving in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper has come to realise that he accepted too easily the myth of Dutch wartime heroism. The result is a long litany of hurt...
There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards,...
The walk from Newcastle railway station to the river goes from the high, crescent-shaped vaults of the train-shed down steep streets bending their way under the tall arches that carry roads and...
La Route d’Uzès, 1954. Nicolas de Staël was an experimental painter. The first half of the 20th century abounded in experimental artists. Not so the second half, which abounded...
For those inclined to ponder the state of the BBC, and of British television in general, the performance of Panorama has long been a favoured indicator. In January 1955, not much more than a year...
A revealing text for understanding the hold that Spanish painting of the 17th century had over the imagination of art-lovers in Britain and France during the first half of the 19th century is the...
One of the subtlest and most entrancing of Bridget Riley’s early paintings, Static 2 (1966), consists of a field of black spots arranged in a pure grid, 25 by 25, across a white square....
One summer day, a year after I’d started skating, a few months after I was kicked out of the boarding school, Blane and I were cruising down Market Street towards the Bay. Market is a great, long...
I think it likely – or slightly more than likely – that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour...
It must be summer. It’s chucking it down with rain, and the words ‘Big Brother’ have returned to the front pages of the tabloids squatting soggily in newsagents’ stands....
On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught...
The Dia Art Foundation has supported a select group of innovative artists with lavish patronage since its founding in 1974. At first, it favoured Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan...
The first of the summer blockbusters is with us. For weeks, Carrie-Anne Moss has glowered beautifully from posters on the Underground, ‘21.05.03’, the release date of The Matrix...
Philip Ward-Jackson’s Public Sculpture of the City of London* is the seventh volume of Public Sculpture of Britain. It does for public sculpture (but not sculpture inside churches or...
The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s –...