Art
A spirit to warm Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’
The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares.…
Clarissa Tan's Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel - a review
During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish…
When a smartphone gallery is better than the real thing
Michael Prodger finds that new technology is transforming how we experience art – in galleries, on computers and on smartphones too
Christopher Sykes’s diary: David Hockney, Bridlington lobster, and the risks of a third martini
I began my week with a trip to Bridlington, the closest seaside town to my childhood home. ‘Brid’, as it’s…
How Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality
Andrew Lambirth finds that Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality
An enigma wrapped in a conundrum
What to make of Banksy? Artist or vandal? Tate Modern holds no Banksys and, other than a redundant phone box…
The picture of health
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book…
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…
Where dreams take shape
The question of what artists actually get up to in their studios has always intrigued the rest of us —…
A fine and private painter
Prunella Clough was a modest and self-effacing artist who nevertheless produced some of the most consistently original and innovative British…
Portraits of an age
By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last…
Currents of imagery
In the first book of his scientific-cum-philosophical poem ‘De rerum Natura’ — or ‘On the Nature of Things’ — Lucretius…
Oh brother!
Long in the writing, deep in research, heavy to hold, this is the latest of umpteen biographies of Vincent van…
Settling old scores
As a boy, Brian Sewell was unimpressed by opera but enraptured by pantomime which, he reveals in Outsider, sowed in…
Lust for life
Seduced by the hayseed hair and the Yorkshire accent it’s tempting to see the young David Hockney as the Freddie…
Art Books: A sumptuous tour
In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of…
William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Patricia Reed
A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail…
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford
Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired…
Art for ransom
These two books make mutually illuminating and surprisingly contrasting companions, given the similarity of their subjects.
Poetry in paint
At the age of just 21, Samuel Palmer produced one of British art’s greatest self-portraits.
The English El Greco
Talk about ‘enemies of promise’.
1951 and all that
The author of this book and I both visited the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank as schoolboys.
Religious doubt
No description of Eric Gill is ever without the words ‘devout Catholic’, and Eric Gill: Lust for Letter & Line…
Fish and chaps
This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book.
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