One of the stylistic rules we have here is that we are discouraged from using the word “icon”. It’s used too casually these days, goes the thinking, too grandly, too glibly, too often. All of which is true. But since Tate Modern has called its Frida Kahlo show The Making of an Icon it cannot, in this […]
Recent articles
Whistler — the cocky revolutionary you want to punch on the nose
There’s a sense with some artists that their careers fell between the cracks. They lived in times of momentous change, but where they fit into that change is unclear. Toulouse-Lautrec was such an artist. Edvard Munch another. And so, certainly, was James Abbott McNeill Whistler. On every front, Whistler (1834-1903) feels interstitial. His dates correspond […]
Ai Weiwei: ‘Exile makes you constantly feel you’re an outsider’
Ai Weiwei doesn’t recognise me. But I recognise him instantly. He’s fuller round the tummy and the snows have fallen on his head, but the big giveaway is the trademark calm he exudes. A volcano could erupt at his feet, Chairman Mao could walk into the room and announce “I’m back!”, and China’s most celebrated […]
Mum, Anish Kapoor is fiddling with my brain
Idon’t know as much about Freudian meanings as Anish Kapoor. He’s spent several decades being psychoanalysed, whereas I read Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents many moons ago. But I have spent enough time in the art world to have picked up some basics. So I know that we have ids and we have egos, and that […]
David Hockney: behind the sunny Yorkshire charm was a fierce revolutionary
There have been many dewy-eyed tributes to David Hockney since his passing on Thursday. Many of us have been moistly remembering the sheer pleasure of spending time with Britain’s most popular artist. The cheeky comments, the naughty stories, the clever insights. I can hear him in my ears right now, his singalong Yorkshire brogue time-stamped […]
MC Escher, the wizard of weirdness who inspired Pink Floyd — and me
Warning: the following review will make most sense to those readers who were once hippies. Pink Floyd fans may enjoy some parts. And anyone who has read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse or Lord of the Rings. Somewhere in the galaxy there is a planet inhabited by crazy woodcutters who enjoy puzzling the bejesus out of the other […]
Marilyn Monroe’s face kept changing — but the camera always loved her
David Attenborough and Marilyn Monroe have one thing in common, but it’s a biggie. Both of them were born in 1926. Just think, if the fates had been less fickle we might now be celebrating Monroe’s 100th birthday too. What would she have looked like? What would she be doing? On second thoughts, let’s not […]
Churchill, Hitler and Franco yearned to be artists — but who was the best painter?
As I marched through the selection of paintings by Winston Churchill that has trooped into the Wallace Collection some bad men popped into my thoughts. Very bad men. The Wallace has brought together a hefty selection of the 500 or so oil paintings Churchill produced in his artistic career. The hope, I suppose, is to […]
My visit to the Russian show that plunged a dagger into the Venice Biennale’s heart
Nietzsche, the pessimistic German philosopher, obviously woke up on the right side of bed when he wrote: “When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than Venice.” Perhaps he had been listening to Black Sabbath the night before. Or God Hates Us All by Slayer. Even by the standards of the world’s […]
This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen
Let’s get the formalities over with immediately. Zurbarán at the National Gallery is one of the greatest shows I have seen. Do whatever it takes to witness it. Take a hammer to Granny’s piggy bank if you must. It’s worth it. You’ll want to know why. Here we plunge into complexities. Some are religious. Some are aesthetic. […]