An entertaining show at Marian Goodman Gallery – where the joke’s on us
Ernest Hemingway loved going to the zoo, but not on Sundays. The reason, he explained, was that, ‘I don’t like…
Is this newly discovered Van Gogh sketchbook real?
Vincent van Gogh spent a remarkably short span of time in the southern French town of Arles. The interval between…
Was James Ensor’s secret that he didn’t really have one?
On 2 August 1933 one of the more improbable meetings of the 20th century took place when Albert Einstein had…
Wonderfully mellow, rich and strange: Paul Nash at Tate Britain reviewed
In 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be British?’ — a conundrum…
Was Picasso making fun of the subjects of his portraits?
As a chat-up line it was at least unusual. On 8 January 1927, a 46-year-old man approached a young woman…
Caravaggio blasts everything else off the walls in the National Gallery’s new show
We don’t know what Caravaggio himself would have made of Beyond Caravaggio, the new exhibition at the National Gallery which…
Majestic, exhilarating and overpowering: Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism reviewed
Martin Gayford is dazzled by the scale, majesty and visual power of the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism show
The 20th century's last art movement
Martin Gayford talks to the men behind arte povera, who took modern art back to the natural world and the past
This large Tate Modern exhibition is cruel to Wifredo Lam
‘My painting is an act of decolonisation,’ declared Wifredo Lam. These are the first words you read on entering the…
The countryside contains enough show-stopping paintings to rival the National Gallery
Martin Gayford says that summer is the perfect time to view the show-stopping art in Britain’s stately homes, which adds up to an alternative National Gallery
Capability Brown is Britain's most influential – and pernicious – artist
In a piece of light verse from the 1770s ‘Dame Nature’ — out strolling ‘one bright day’ — bumps into…
What’s the avant-garde up to? Recycling (itself) and baffling (me)
One overcast afternoon in late July I took a train to Norfolk. It seemed a good time and place to…
What makes William Eggleston's ordinary photographs so extraordinary?
In 1965 William Eggleston took the first colour photograph that, he felt, really succeeded. The location was outside a supermarket…
My pilgrimage to see the world’s greatest male nudes
Initially it must have been a nasty surprise. On 16 August 1972 an amateur scuba diver named Stefano Mariottini was…
The over-exposure of Georgia O’Keeffe
In 1927, Georgia O’Keeffe announced that she would like her next exhibition to be ‘so magnificently vulgar that all the…
Bologna with Gilbert & George
Sooner or later, no matter where you are travelling on Italian railways, you are likely to pass through Bologna Centrale.…
Piero della Francesca meets Dalí: Winifred Knights at Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed
‘Hidden beauty is best (half seen), faces turned away.’ So noted a young English painter named Winifred Knights in 1924.…
You can tell a lot from the paintings painters owned, as this National Gallery show proves
‘In the end, nothing goes with anything,’ Lucian Freud remarked one afternoon years ago. ‘It’s your taste that puts things…
It’s time to split the Tate again
In 1992 I wrote a column that was published under the headline ‘It’s Time to Split the Tate’. To my…
Like Rubens, Jeff Koons’s work is about repetition, fertility and sex
At one time, Damien Hirst was fond of remarking that art should deal with the Gauguin questions. Namely, ‘Where do…
The treasures of Alexandria revealed: British Museum’s Sunken cities reviewed
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
As he approaches 80, the German master Georg Baselitz contemplates the end
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
This Parisian exhibition has rewritten the story of art
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
How a Liberal MP's inability to draw led him to invent photography
William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for…
Norman Sicily was a multicultural paradise – but it didn’t last long
There are lessons to be learned from the disintegration of this once majestic multicultural Norman kingdom, says Martin Gayford
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