As a visual experience it is less than overwhelming: Dalí/Duchamp reviewed
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
How do artists vanish?
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
At her best, Rachel Whiteread is almost edibly attractive – but less is more
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
The Victorian painter who shaped cinema
On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the…
Snap, crackle and op: no one can beat Bridget Riley
Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…
‘The abstract paintings all went in the bin’: Gary Hume interviewed
There is more to the artist Gary Hume than glossy surfaces, as Martin Gayford finds out when he meets him
The importance of odds and ends in the work of Matisse
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
The Victorian artist who was more Jackson Pollock than Pre-Raphaelite
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
Full of visual pleasures: National Portrait Gallery's The Encounter reviewed
Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head. But portraiture is a game for two.…
John Minton: well-known but not great enough; John Virtue: great but not well-known enough
Wherever one looked in the arts scene of the 1940s and ’50s, one was likely to encounter the tragicomic figure…
A pilloried president, PC portraits and paintings good enough to eat
Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether…
The most celebrated work of modernism that almost nobody has seen
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…
Lucian Freud was wrong to think Raphael dull – he was a genius
Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics…
There are hints in this show at Buckingham Palace of another, more imaginative Canaletto
One evening a few weeks ago I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition at the Venice…
It’s hard to imagine a better overview: Giacometti at Tate Modern reviewed
Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art…
Huge, diverse and yet monotonous, the Venice Biennale is very like the EU
‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…
John Richardson: Bullfighting with Picasso
Picasso had a thing for bulls. Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer. Sir John Richardson about a lifelong obsession
Chris Ofili’s weird watercolour tapestries mark a return to form
Many of the mediums from which art is made have been around for a long time. People have been painting…
Constable was every bit as good at sea-painting as Turner
John Constable was, as we say these days, conflicted about Brighton. On the one hand, as he wrote in a…
Would the artists in Tate’s Queer British Art show have approved of being included?
‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a…
Is collage the natural idiom for our cut-and-paste society?
How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together…
Howard Hodgkin claimed not to be an abstract artist. So what exactly was he?
The late Howard Hodgkin stated emphatically that he was not an abstract artist. So what exactly was he? asks Martin Gayford
Was Sebastiano imitating Michelangelo or – a startling thought – vice versa?
Martin Gayford is mystified by the mismatched working partnership between Michelangelo and the painter Sebastiano del Piombo
The key to the Italian Renaissance lies in the home
There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others…
Coolly contemporary – especially in its muddle: Wolfgang Tillmans at the Tate reviewed
These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are…
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