Art history

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies. From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly

If you want to see the very best of Gauguin and Matisse, go east. That was the case in 1914 and it’s still true today. The reason, then and now, lay in the collecting habits, both discerning and extravagantly acquisitive, of two men: Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The first of these has already been the subject of a notable book by Natalya Semenova; the present work is its sequel. Although long since ‘nationalised’, the pictures these two men owned are still among the principal treasures of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. On a visit to Moscow in 1928 Alfred Barr, the director of the

The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history. ‘Small but subversive’ could describe the man as well as his collection: his fabulous wealth, inherited from Virginian tobacco plantation-owning ancestry, coupled with his rampant homosexuality, shaped a life of compulsive and conspicuous extravagance, in which art and sex vied with one another for supremacy against the backdrop of Belgravia and a palazzo just off

The Mediterranean-centred era spanning a century or so either side of 1492 is filled to the brim with stories. There was the discovery of the Americas by a bold Genoese navigator; power struggles between wealthy Italian families, waged through conspiracies, poisonings and stabbings; a radical Dominican monk who managed to impose near-theocratic rule on a republican city before being burned at the stake; the advent of humanism and, subsequently, of a modern, power-focused theory of politics; and the maturing of the visual arts to a new level of sophistication, realism and emotional power. Such stories make up a significant part of the cultural inheritance of the West.  Histories, biographies, novels,

At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself’. He was a landmark — more or less literally. You could visit Brantwood, where he had his Lake District home in later life, and buy postcards of him. There were ‘Ruskin ceramics, Ruskin linen and lace products and Ruskin fireplaces’ available. In New Jersey, undismayed by the great man’s loathing of tobacco, there was a company that sold ‘John Ruskin’ premium cigars. Postmortem you could get Ruskin souvenir brassware or toasting forks and a scale model of the Ruskin monument near Keswick. But that,

The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its focus is drapery, and the way that artists of the Italian Renaissance clothed their subjects, and furnished their narratives, to articulate veils of meaning that were infinitely suggestive. Marshalling a lifetime’s inquiry into the art of that era, Paul Hills — emeritus professor at the Courtauld, and author of the classic Venetian Colour — deploys an X-ray vision to drill beneath the skin, to find the pulse, the heartbeat of a painting or sculptural relief. He offers a key, a new entry point into works we thought we were familiar

The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was asked why — in the early 1960s — he had suddenly increased the size of works in his long-standing abstract series, ‘Homage to the Square’, from 16×16 inches to 48×48. Was it a response to the vastness of his adopted homeland, the United States? A reaction to the huge canvases used by the abstract expressionist painters in New York? ‘No, no,’ Albers replied. ‘It was just when we got a station wagon.’ In Charles Darwent’s new biography, Albers (1888–1976) comes across as a man as frill-free as the art for which he’s famous. Apparently, he held

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of

In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The beetling brow, piercing eye and a succession of roll-ups stuck to his lower lip offer almost a caricature of the undimmed rascality of the old devil. Like all the films in that remarkable series, it offers a glimpse into a world that we thought television was invented too late to record. But how much more extraordinary it is to watch, in a three-minute film made in 1915, another elderly artist — the 74-year-old Pierre-Auguste Renoir, crippled with arthritis, working at his easel. The externals are similar — the beard, the

There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a very strange painter he was. There was an element of theatricality in his working practice — the public would expect to be astonished when they glimpsed it — but, even so, it is difficult to imagine any artist producing anything using Gainsborough’s methods. He painted in semi-darkness, and an observer reported that sitters for portraits found that ‘neither they nor their pictures were scarcely discernible’. The canvas, if large, was hung loosely, ‘secured by small cords’. James Hamilton describes it as ‘rigged perhaps like a small yacht, the canvas bellying

What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories of myriad emails? We will be like butterfly hunters flailing around with our nets, hoping to catch some rare specimen with glittering wings among the detritus of daily exchanges. The letters of Ida Nettleship, first wife of the arch-bohemian Augustus John, are a case in point: gathered together here from diverse sources by her granddaughter Rebecca John and expertly introduced by John’s biographer Michael Holroyd, they constitute a rare epistolary treasure trove. Spanning some 15 years, from Ida’s late teens to her early death from puerperal fever at 30, following

How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image thought suitable viewing for all ages in public art galleries? There is no doubt about its early despicable reputation. A hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Cicero declared that ‘the very word cross should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts’. It was the cross that gave rise to the word excruciating. It makes me feel rather queasy to envisage the slow death by suffocation of the crucified man, left without the strength to draw breath, so I was glad

‘How often’, wrote Sigmund Freud in 1914, ‘have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the heroic glance.’ The gaze that the founder of psychoanalysis struggled to withstand belonged to Michelangelo’s Moses, centrepiece of the tomb of Julius II in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli. Michelangelo’s Moses has indeed a look of formidable authority. The prophet possesses, in addition, the physique of a body-builder, a beard that cascades like Niagara Falls and a pair of knees for which the best adjective is also ‘heroic’. Yet, despite its power,

Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later. Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously.

Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809: Every rope in the English Navy has a red thread running through it, which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole, so that even the smallest length of rope can be recognised as belonging to the crown. Bucklow’s book follows a red thread through human history, whose twin strands are material extraction — the animal, vegetable and mineral lives of red — and the extraction of meanings from redness itself. All colour is cultural. We have our private definitions — the unshareable conviction as to what is and is not red —

Roland Penrose (1900–84) was a Surrealist painter and object-maker, a collector and art world grandee, a writer and organiser of exhibitions, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and biographer of Picasso. He amply illustrates Goethe’s dictum that we are rich at the price of our contradictions. Born a wealthy Quaker, Penrose rebelled and became an artist. He was deeply involved with the revolutionary practice of Surrealism but was also an establishment figure: a substantial landowner who accepted a knighthood for services to the arts. His private life was equally divided. His first marriage, to the poet Valentine Boue, was never consummated. His second and more famous wife was

Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that we should need any such reminder after the depredations of the Taleban in Afghanistan, or Isis’s earlier rampage through the museum in Mosul and its attacks on sites at Hatra and Nimrud. A former director at the Institute of Ideas and a visiting fellow at the LSE, Tiffany Jenkins applies her considerable experience of cultural policy to construct an excellent survey that rehearses the issues. Who is responsible for the great examples of our shared heritage? Where should they be located: where they originated; where they have ended up; or