Lisa Brice is no spring chicken. She’s 56. Yet only in the past few years has she managed to transform herself from “promising female painter with complex ideas about the role of women in art” to “ubiquitous art star”. These days you need a few million in the bank to buy a hefty Brice. What’s […]
Recent articles
The forty million dollar man who made painting fashionable again
Peter Doig. Whenever I see the name I hear the rustle of dollar bills and the jingle jangle of a big win on the slot machines. To my mind, Doig’s art — which fetches up to $40 million a painting — has become synonymous with fiscal success, and even interchangeable with it. However, his new […]
Gilbert & George? It’s like being stuck with a pub bore
Two veteran artistic presences have appeared in London simultaneously. Both have been around the block many times. One remains fresh, active, naughty. The other has grown tired, repetitive, boring. Let’s deal with the tedious one first. Let’s deal with Gilbert & George. In the Sixties, when they were in their twenties, the two Gs were messing […]
Kate Moss and Lucian Freud — the supermodel reveals her side of the story
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 […]
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
A good 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 […]
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 […]