Exhibitions

In 1965 a journalist asked Paula Rego why she painted. ‘To give a face to fear,’ she replied (those were the days of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal). But when asked the same question shortly afterwards, Rego added a qualification: ‘There’s more to it than that: I paint because I can’t stop painting.’ Rego has

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is ‘to find a diamond or a pearl.’ He was quite correct. Truly marvellous pictures are extremely rare. To make one, Vincent went on, you have to ‘stake your life’ (as he, indeed, was doing). Well,

‘The possibilities of paint,’ Frank Bowling has observed, ‘are endless.’ The superb career retrospective of his work at Tate Britain demonstrates as no words could that he is correct, and that the obituaries of this perennial medium — so often declared moribund or defunct — are completely wrong. This presents more than half a century’s

Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip at £3) would have it, ‘Plastics have no intrinsic form or texture, thus they are not materials that can be true to themselves.’ They exist within inverted commas. They can be shell-like, horn-like, stony, metallic

This mesmerising retrospective takes up three floors of the City Art Centre, moving in distinct stages from the reedy flanks of the Pentland Hills through fractured half-views of Venice and Scotland and into fresh, twilit forests. Mirrors and windows reflect and refract, rigid faces stare from the shadows, animals flit and bare branches twist. It’s

The best double acts — Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert & George, Rodgers and Hart — are often made up of two quite different personalities. So it was with the painters William Nicholson and James Pryde, who worked together under the names of J. & W. Beggarstaff. Their similarities and dissimilarities are the subject of a

The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800 BC, someone even found the space to scrawl on a portable sandstone sphinx. Look closely towards the base of the sculpture and you will find a delicate line drawing of an ox head. Remarkably, this

Henry Moore was, it seems, one of the most notable fresh-air fiends in art history. Not only did he prefer to carve stone outside — working in his studio felt like being in ‘prison’ — but he felt the sculpture came out better that way too, in natural light. What’s more, he believed that the

Sean Scully once told me about his early days as a plasterer’s mate. At the age of 17 he was helping a craftsman who would often accidentally drop a good deal of plaster on his youthful assistant’s head, especially after a midday break in the pub. Scully spent his own lunchtimes differently. He would roar

An eyewitness described Edvard Munch supervising the print of a colour lithograph in 1896. He stood in front of the stones on which the head of a masterpiece was drawn. He then closed his eyes tightly, stabbed the air with his finger, and gave his instructions. ‘Print… grey, green, blue, brown.’ Then he opened his

Is now a good time to talk about Jews and money? The Jewish Museum in London thinks so, and perhaps it is right. Motifs of Jewish financial chicanery that have never really gone away are back. The internet age has allowed memes about Rothschilds, rootless financiers and other thinly veiled claims of Jewish duplicity to

All good narrative painting contains an element of allegory, but most artists don’t go looking for it on a Coventry council estate — unless, that is, they happen to come from there. Since starting his Scenes from the Passion series while at the Royal College in the 1990s, George Shaw has been painting the Tile

Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in Florence. Though stuck full of arrows, the martyr was, according to Vasari, distinctly good-looking in this picture: ‘sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with corresponding beauty of person’. By and by the friars of San

Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s scientific observation that the stuff of dreams will out, artists were painting it. The English have never been much cop at surrealism — too buttoned up; the Celts are better. The Scottish painters Alan Davie

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The 40 years the sculptor spent teaching at the Slade, where her pupils included Rachel Whiteread, have not only left her creative energies intact, but completely failed to keep a lid on them. After turning Tate

When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large part of its visual culture. In a brief six years the government of Edward VI effectively whitewashed over England’s native heritage of sacred art, leaving a country already reliant on foreign painters for its royal

MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer, less of an artist? The son of a Brighton clergyman, his career was built on a sequence of remarkable connections. The architect Halsey Ricardo, a descendant of the economist, was his tutor. While working for

The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick houses was St Paul’s, rising triumphantly through the haze. Mann, who grew up in Nottingham and trained at the Royal Academy in the 1930s, had painted the bombsites around Spitalfields and the streets of postwar