Recent articles

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

SCENE 1 — The announcement that someone is making a film about an artist is never met with enthusiasm in my household. There have been too many horrors. Films about artists are invariably a cultural mistake — melodramatic, overwrought, inaccurate, irritating. The spectacle of Ed Harris sweating and trembling his way through the Jackson Pollock movie, […]

The differences between men and women are both obvious and subtle. The obvious ones continue to be the subject of an unpleasant turf war on X and are none of this column’s business. But the subtle differences take us deep into the world of art, and there we do need to take notice. Two women-only […]

Some people were meant to come together — Lennon and McCartney, Fonteyn and Nureyev, Ant and Dec. But nowhere in God’s swirling universe was it ever a good idea to pair Anselm Kiefer with Vincent van Gogh. Yet that, absurdly, is what the Royal Academy has chosen to attempt in a show that jars like […]

Jenny Saville arrived in art with the loudest splash I can remember. One moment she was invisible, the next she was unmissable: a huge talent, painting huge pictures, of a huge subject, in a hugely different manner. Everyone noticed her. This was early in the 1990s and chiefly the handiwork of Charles Saatchi, the most […]