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 […]
Recent articles
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. […]
Alexander Calder is a cheeky boy — no wonder he’s the toast of Paris
A hunger for innocence.” The phrase pushed its way into my thoughts at the start of the enormous Alexander Calder look-back at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, and refused to shift through the many rooms that followed. Calder (1898-1976) is cemented in art history as the inventor of mobiles: hanging sculptures that move with […]
I thought William Blake was a one-off but this powerful show surprised me
If you can judge a nation by the artists it has produced — and you surely can — where does that leave us with William Blake? A generous assessment of his mental condition is that he was very odd. A less generous reading, one with which I concur, is that he was certifiably mad, totally […]
The raw power of red — and my brief history of art in one colour
You can’t miss it. Written in the window of the Ordovas gallery in London is the single word RED. Some exhibition titles try to entice you in. Not this one. This one feels like an instruction. Come in and see this show, it shouts. Or else. Inside, a tasty selection of modern artists can be seen […]
Why is Easter all about eggs? Forget chocolate, and look to art
Have you been observing Lent? Not eating meat or drinking alcohol, praying, giving alms, refraining from sex for 40 days? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I myself have failed in most of those ambitions, although I did at least find some old coins from the time when money was money to hand out to anyone I encountered […]
The forgotten female artist who towers over Rubens
Michaelina Wautier is not a name that trips off the tongue. It never has done. When she was alive (1604-89) her friends and family called her Michelle. Only in her art would she sign herself in a scratchy and effortful script the full “Michaelina Wautier”, sometimes adding, with evident pride, “painted and invented this”. In […]