Culture

In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when the War Office commissioned Frank Newbould in 1942 to design a poster with the patriotic slogan ‘Your BRITAIN – fight for it now’, it featured Sussex, with a shepherd herding sheep in the foreground and

‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish gypsies in the port city. The family of American railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington had just docked at the start of an 1882 European tour that would introduce Archer to the National Gallery and the

‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’

There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of human pleasure; crocks and bottles are usually just vehicles for displays of technical virtuosity. Crocks and bottles are what Giorgio Morandi painted, not because he wanted to show off but because he liked their lack

Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of the corner of his mouth. The two men, busy bundling sticks in a wood, look around apprehensively while a third man up a ladder attacks a tree with a billhook. The three of them are

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards

 The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show. Excluded from official art schools and reliant on

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across

Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s new Cezanne blockbuster have begun by dropping the acute accent from his surname, apparently a Parisian affectation not in use on the artist’s home turf. Anticipating grumbles about another major exhibition devoted to a dead

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary

William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it, from my first delighted sight of one of his charcoal-drawn animations, ‘Monument’ (1990), in the Whitechapel’s 2004 exhibition Faces in the Crowd to my awestruck confrontation with his eight-channel video installation I am not me,

Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with an inflatable ball with her young daughter in the early 1960s that Maria Bartuszova had the idea of filling balloons with liquid plaster instead of air. The inspiration fed her muse for 30 years, seeding

‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The latter – olive – vine – flowers… warmth & light, better health – greater novelty – & less expense in life. On the other side are, in England, cold, damp & dullness, – constant hurry

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins, where she was greeted with a wide-eyed grin. ‘This is wonderful – the first Allied soldier I’ve seen, and it’s you!’ the artist exclaimed, reaching up to place his hand affectionately around her

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he is too uncontroversial, his appeal too broad, his approach altogether too winsome. None of that stopped the team behind Philip Guston Now – a travelling mega-survey of his work, which will reach Tate Modern in

‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the moment you push open the Hayward’s heavy swing doors you see what he means. Outside, a world of grey utilitarian concrete; inside, a vibrant crew of invaders from planet Zog glittering like Technicolor Pearly Kings

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist?

Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to the general public. But with Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery is on to a winner, as not only is the particular picture a showstopper, but the theme opens up a whole

Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents sent her a silver spoon or fork every birthday. She seems to have had a thing about silverware ever since. She used to sell it on Portobello Market, and it formed the basis of her

Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his white-jacketed Jamaican model Henry Thomas must be the strangest. Taken to publicise his 1934 exhibition, it would be unthinkable now but in the circles Philpot moved in at the time it might, I suppose, have

In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to the local borough council. Thrown in at the deep end without a permanent collection, Hastings Contemporary, as it is now known, has to sink or swim on the strength of its exhibition programme. How to

The point at which the heart sinks in this exhibition is, unfortunately, right at the outset. That’s where we meet the five commentators that the British Museum has invited to respond to the objects and ideas in the exhibition. But only Mary Beard knows her subject. There’s Bonnie Greer, playwright and critic; Elizabeth Day, podcaster

When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The English art establishment has never bothered with what was going on north of the border, which explains, though doesn’t excuse, the underrepresentation of Scottish art in the Tate’s so-called national collection. This leaves a gap

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of it, tucked away, scattered throughout the maze of alleyways and canals. And the art is no longer confined to the Biennale’s national pavilions in the gardens. It has spread, via dozens of tagalong shows cashing

In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s Hillary’; Jeremy Hunt wins the Tory leadership contest. The British Library has something similar at its Breaking the News exhibition. The difference is that these ones actually made it to the newsstand. It’s enough to

Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen to welcome visitors with a written statement. In 2014 it commissioned the poet Lemn Sissay, who spent his teenage years in a children’s home, to create a memorial in its entrance hall to the many