Culture

In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove picked up by a stranger at an ice rink. At a certain point the glove washes up, nightmarishly large, beside a sleeping man’s bed on to which a shipwrecked sailor is desperately hauling himself. Storm-tossed

During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’, in the presence of the artist. ‘I am sure he doesn’t himself regard it as a great picture now.’ At this Duchamp bridled, exclaiming in his excellent English, ‘I

‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’ Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to

Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging to dry? Or was he hidden by steam from the basins? The laundry women are unselfconscious, unguarded. One reads aloud from a list, calling out shirts, collars, cuffs to be washed and ironed. Another leans

At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting of a mother and baby. At one time the ‘Angel of Mercy’ was sold as a greetings card by its owner, the Yale Center of British Art in Connecticut, presumably intended as something you might

Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside out — that is, casting the cavities — Whiteread has accomplished one of the traditional tasks of art: revealing structure, beauty and mystery in the everyday. Her work is a remarkable contribution to an overlooked

On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. This described a purple house in the middle of a garden, the paths of which were made of yellow sand. The walls were glass bricks ‘in the shape of purple

Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve. Something you normally expect to be static and stable — a panel covered with painted lines — undulates and pulses. In addition to just black and white, the pigments actually present, other hues appear and

One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered Cézanne a ‘curiously incapable’ menace, and a cracking show it will be. Until then, we must take what we can from exhibitions like True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s & 1930s. Here,

Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist provided an answer, which is quoted in the catalogue to Matisse in the Studio, a marvellous new exhibition at the Royal Academy. He did not care, he explained, ‘to play with signs that never change’.

On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the ‘breath of the Creator acting on nebulous matter’ causing ‘agitating waves & revolving lines’ to fly out in all directions. With hindsight, it is tempting to conclude that Watts had a vision not, as he

Some art can be made in solitude, straight out of the artist’s head. But portraiture is a game for two. That’s the lesson of The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, a marvellous little exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It is essentially a medley of Old Master works on papers from various British collections

Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering around White Cube Bermondsey, where the walls are so pristine no label is allowed to sully them, struggling to work out what I was looking at. I was reduced to photographing the works in order

Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile

Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics and art historians. While we were admiring the Raphael frescoes that fill these private apartments of the Renaissance popes, Matthias Wivel, curator of the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at the National Gallery, made the most

One evening a few weeks ago I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition at the Venice Biennale when I stopped for a moment in a quiet campo off the main drag. An elderly priest was standing on the steps of the church of Santa Maria della Fava in the weak sunshine.

Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) illustrates the distinction. There are very few major artists who have produced objects so physically minuscule. But the smaller and thinner his people are, the vaster the space they seem to

‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini and the endless rooms of the Arsenale. It is not easy to answer. The whole affair is so huge, so diverse and yet — in many ways — so monotonous. Like the EU, an organisation

Many of the mediums from which art is made have been around for a long time. People have been painting on walls, for example, for about 40,000 years. Similarly, figures have been fashioned out of stone and metal for millennia, and still are. But if there is one ancient medium you might think was now

John Constable was, as we say these days, conflicted about Brighton. On the one hand, as he wrote in a letter, he was revolted by this marine Piccadilly, populated with: ‘ladies dressed & undressed — gentlemen in morning gowns and slippers on, or without them altogether about knee deep in the breakers — footmen —

‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a private view in the 1960s. ‘And that’s heterosexual art.’ It would have been intriguing to hear his views on Queer British Art at Tate Britain. All the more so since it includes several of his

The house in which I lived in Tokyo was built by my landlady, a former geisha. It stood on a plot of land given to her by her last lover. It was small, full of light and positioned to enjoy the large ginkgo tree in the garden next door. It was easily the best designed

How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together in a different order. That is, roughly speaking, the recipe for collage. Thus in 1934 Max Ernst snipped away at a pile of illustrations to 19th-century novels, reassembled them in an altered fashion, and came

There have been many explanations for what happened in the Italian Renaissance. Some stress the revival of classical antiquity, others the rise of individualism. A pioneering exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, takes a different line. It’s all about the 15th- and 16th-century household — and

These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are taken every day on smartphones and tablets. They zip around the world by the billion. When I went to Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at Tate Modern, the galleries were full of people taking snaps of the

Rudolfo Paolozzi was a great maker. In the summer, he worked almost without stopping in the family’s ice-cream shop, making gallon after gallon of vanilla custard. In the slack winter months, when the shop made its money on cigarettes and sweets, he built radios from odds and sods. It was on one of these homemade

Vladimir Putin notoriously declared the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century. However, as Revolution: Russian Art 1917–32 — an ambitious exhibition at the Royal Academy — helps to make clear, the true catastrophe had occurred 82 years earlier, in 1917. Like many of