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…
The good, the bad and the ugly: RA’s America after the Fall reviewed
The latest exhibition at the Royal Academy is entitled America after the Fall. It deals with painting in the United…
The true harshness of Soviet life rarely comes through: RA’s Revolution reviewed
Vladimir Putin notoriously declared the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be one of the greatest disasters of…
Michelangelo’s grave miscalculation
‘How often’, wrote Sigmund Freud in 1914, ‘have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the…
Lucian Freud’s etchings are some of the strongest things he ever did
Two divergent approaches to printmaking are on view in an exhibition of graphic work by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud…
Martin Gayford celebrates the quiet, underrated masterpieces of Michael Andrews
Martin Gayford celebrates the quiet, underrated masterpieces of Michael Andrews
Sandra Blow's paintings hold their own with Sixties stars like Hockney and Riley
In the 1940s Lucian Freud took another young painter, Sandra Blow, up to the top of a bombed church in…
Who was the real Victor Pasmore?
Victor Pasmore once told me how he greeted Pablo Picasso at Victoria station. The great man had come to Britain…
The USSR, USA, David Hockney and plywood: Martin Gayford on the visual treats of 2017
Martin Gayford looks forward to two big Russian shows coming to London next year – and to other visual treats on offer in 2017
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