Almost every North American museum of art today includes a gallery of modern and contemporary work, and little separates the colonial furniture, the Romantic waterfall and the careworn Rodin nude...
Fats Waller trying to teach an English woman to jitterbug on the transatlantic liner that returned him to America in 1939 after a long musical tour and happy stay in Britain, where he composed...
A retrospective exhibition of the work of Hamish Fulton is at Tate Britain until 4 June. Walking Journey is downstairs from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration...
At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes,...
‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ the New York Times said in June 1942, ‘but it is certainly the finest yet made about the...
Living as we do in the Land of the League Table, there’s sadly little call to be surprised by the appearance of what some will see as a prosopographical breakthrough: a book confidently...
Two exhibitions, one in London, the other in Grasmere, might have been framed to show how thinking and feeling have changed since the ‘death of God’ early last century. The landscape...
First the rainbow brought messages, later it demanded explanations. In the story of Noah it is God’s promise of an end to floods; in Greek mythology, Iris was both goddess of the rainbow and the...
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may be ‘the world’s most famous painting’ but almost everything about it is obscure. We don’t know precisely when it was painted, we...
Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking...
John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the...
I was reading in a coffee shop a couple of months ago when a young man asked if he might take my photograph. I said that I would rather he didn’t – which was churlish, because I have...
You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in the United States. After all, you’ll say, aren’t the key American...
In his account of late capitalism Fredric Jameson describes its cultural logic as if it were a schizophrenic – broken in language, amnesiac about history, in thrall to glossy images, subject...
Paul Klee drew many different kinds of picture, and the exhibition on at the Hayward Gallery until 1 April, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, arranges them by kind rather than chronologically....
‘To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-semitic.’ So said Budd Schulberg, the son of a pioneer film producer, a successful screenwriter and author of the quintessential...
As we go to press at the beginning of the last quarter of February, the phoney spring is over. Mid-January to mid-February was the warmest it’s been since 1659 (which is when records...
Once again the National Gallery visits the Dutch at home. This time not Vermeer and de Hooch’s Delft but Aelbert Cuyp’s Dordrecht: instead of brick courtyards and side-lit rooms where...