A couple of miles from the centre of Manchester, on the bank of the Ship Canal, the Imperial War Museum North stands – all bright in gleaming aluminium. A new pedestrian bridge crosses to it...
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II (1967) O nly about 120 of Barnett Newman’s sparse output of paintings survive, and nothing from before the mid-1940s, so the 109 items...
L ate in August I visited Documenta 11, the most recent version of the mega-exhibition that has been held in the German city of Kassel since 1955, when Arnold Bode, a professor of art at the...
The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression...
B efore 1983 the Chelsea Physic Garden was a secret place you glimpsed from the top of a bus passing along the Embankment. Not many got through its gates – one director, at least, took...
D uke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the...
E lvis was photographed in a Hawaiian shirt, so were Bing Crosby (he had his own label), Harry Truman and Walt Disney. They are beach wear – proof that you are on vacation. The style was...
In Cairo and Abu Dhabi, the two Arab capitals I have visited this year, street and palace are for once in harmony. A pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he might, at...
If you watch The Simpsons or South Park – cartoon serials where gangs of doodles get to demonstrate the wisdom in modern stupidity – you come to feel that the characters are really...
I n the early 1960s a spectre was haunting New York, the spectre of banality. Hannah Arendt was publishing her articles on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in the New Yorker, and the mostly...
T urner’s remark ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved’ is as good a posthumous puff as any artist ever gave another. It’s printed on the back of Tate...
The name Donald Francis Tovey (always rather pompously in full) used to typify, before career musicology swept all before it, the broadly cultured rather than narrowly scholarly writer on music,...
At Walmington-on-Sea Captain Mainwaring of the Home Guard is addressing his platoon of part-time soldiers: Well, we’re making progress. A short time ago we were just an undisciplined mob....
I n 1910, Sickert, writing about the newly formed Contemporary Art Society’s plan to buy modern work for public galleries, gave three reasons for thinking it a bad idea. First, it would...
A s you come into Moscow from Sheremetevo airport, the way is guarded by a monument marking the limit of the German advance in October 1941: red girders protrude from a sloping plinth, forming a...
Back in 1982, as we came out of a show of Lucian Freud’s paintings at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in Dering Street (it had not been a brief visit), a friend asked what I thought...
29 May. Everyone I know is obsessed with Roy Keane’s tournament-ending public diatribe against the Ireland manager, Mick McCarthy. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, having meetings...
B eing a species with no fur, scales or feathers, oddly disposed hair and unique self-consciousness about our sexual parts, we turn to clothes. Clothes, by clinging, squeezing, covering, exposing,...