Magnificent paintings – oddly curated: All Too Human reviewed
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art:…
Lemons and pebbles are as important to Kettle’s Yard as the art
When I first visited Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, I was shown around by Jim Ede, its founder and creator. This wasn’t…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed
Martin Gayford is overwhelmed by the sheer concentration of visual splendour amassed by Charles I
Turning marble into cushions and stone into flesh: the magic of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was…
The time has come for one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic Renaissance artists
Lorenzo Lotto was overlooked by 16th-century Venice, but now, says Martin Gayford, his time has come
After you’ve seen a few, you start to think, ‘Oh no, not another!’: Modigliani at Tate reviewed
‘It’s odd,’ Picasso once mused, ‘but you never see Modigliani drunk anywhere but at the corners of the boulevard Montmartre…
Sex and the city: the best art books of the year
‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this.…
The most impressive array of work to be seen in London in years: Cézanne’s Portraits reviewed
The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful…
The advantages of turning down the colour knob: Monochrome reviewed
Leonardo da Vinci thought sculpting a messy business. The sculptor, he pointed out, has to bang away with a hammer,…
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…
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