Why do people make tremulous films about artists? It’s a question I was close to screaming when I exited James Lucas’s film of the brief encounter between the supermodel Kate Moss and the super-duper painter Lucian Freud in the coke-stoked naughty Noughties. Moss & Freud is well short of being the worst example of this failed […]
Recent articles
The truth about Lee Miller is darker than Tate Britain would have us believe
The first thing to say about Lee Miller at Tate Britain is that it is a marvellous exhibition, full of riveting photography and powerful moments. The second thing to say about it is that it is dense with sexual complications and psychological darknesses that are more problematic than the show wants to admit. It’s not a cover-up. […]
The Turner prize is the cockroach of art
However many times the Turner prize gets stamped on, however fiercely we wish to dispose of it, however bad it gets, it survives the hammering and comes back for more. It is the cockroach of art and its resilience over four testing decades is almost heroic. This year’s effort has travelled to Bradford, Britain’s City […]
Sex and the devil — this is the art they didn’t want you to see
Agood thing to do when a new pope is elected is to visit the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and see what they have done with Michelangelo’s Risen Christ. I haven’t been myself yet. It’s too early in the reign of Leo XIV to be certain where he stands on art. But I […]
Theatre Picasso is the most thrilling show at Tate Modern in years
There’s a lot of art about “the theatre”, but most of it is not about the theatre as you or I know it. It’s not about the tremendous dithering of David Tennant in Hamlet or Mark Rylance’s comic malignancy as Johnny in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Great artists are pathologically immune to the great performances of others. They go […]
The mystery of the forgotten master who rivals Caravaggio
Sometimes in art, people disappear. In their lifetimes, they are celebrated, famous, influential, but after they die, fashions change and they slip down the back of the great art sofa in the sky. It can happen to the mightiest talents. It happened to Caravaggio, Vermeer, even Rembrandt. Forgotten for centuries, they needed to wait to […]
Gauguin, Van Gogh and the secret of a truly revealing portrait
A fat guy sits at a table looking glum. Blobby and balding, he wears scruffy sandals and a shapeless jumper. If you saw him in the street you’d have him down as the owner of a hardware store, or perhaps one of the unfortunates done over by the Post Office. Never in a month of […]
Van Gogh and the secret meanings of plants
Ihave remembered a cartoon that made me giggle. Henry VIII walks into a florist. On the counter is a sign advising customers to Say It with Flowers. So Henry says: “I’ll have a bunch of stalks.” Which proves, I suppose, that saying it with flowers can be good for a laugh. But, as Hope B […]
My trip to Cézanne’s home town — he was a cranky genius from the start
Art has many powers but its superpower, the one that comes closest to magic, is its ability to turn nowhere into somewhere. All over the world, in situation after situation, we have seen it happen. Bilbao was one of the least visited cities in Spain until 1997, when the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, […]
Our greatest football photographer’s secret? Ignore the game
The world of football is not, you would have thought, a world that concerns itself overly with events in art. These two great spheres of human endeavour appear fiercely separated. And in most locations they are. But not in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where, unbelievably, a gallery has inveigled its way into the hall of balls and […]