Childishness became a desirable quality in art with the arrival of modernism at the start of the 20th century. As Picasso famously quipped: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” And it wasn’t just Picasso. An entire generation of modernists — Klee, Miró, Kandinsky — […]
Recent articles
Gory and gruesome — this is the bloodiest art I’ve seen
Another day, another tragedy. Look over your shoulder in any direction and the world seems to be sobbing. The Middle East — sob. The climate — sob. Ukraine — sob. So people have once again been dreaming about the healing power of art. It was something I noticed during Covid. People kept writing to say […]
Historic portrait by ‘Britain’s Caravaggio’ bought for the nation
He is handsome. Self-absorbed. Black cloak. White cravat. His hair, parted down the middle, falls around his face in dark and buoyant ringlets. Big moustache. Trendy goatee. You can imagine him as a singer-songwriter of the hippy era or perhaps, more weirdly, as a model for Jesus in a Rembrandt painting. Certainly, there is sorrow […]
Helen Chadwick stripped off inside a cooker — and changed art
Yorkshire. Brontë country. Where the skies seem bigger and the emotions weightier. Especially when there are exhibitions to visit as stirring and provocative as Helen Chadwick at the Hepworth Wakefield and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s curatorial debut at Leeds Art Gallery. Chadwick (1953-1996) was an impish artistic presence whose career, in her prime, was difficult to miss. […]
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits review — an old-style triumph
I share a birthday with John Singer Sargent: January 12. It’s just a quirk of dates and means nothing. But for the kinds of inchoate human reasons that swirl about in the darker and stupider regions of the mind, it has always made him feel closer to me than other artists. Perhaps it is why […]
The National Gallery rehang review — a radical journey through art
At last. After a three-year rebuild and rehang that felt like ten years, Britain’s chief treasure house of old master art, the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, is ready for visitors again. The 200th anniversary facelift is complete. And the results are a shock. I was expecting change. But not this much. The most […]
Dear Tate Modern, happy 25th birthday — here’s how to be fabulous at 50
Dear Tate Modern, First, and most important, happy birthday! Pop the corks and toot the horns! A quarter century is an exciting age. Lots ahead, and lots behind. I will, of course, be giving you advice on how to make your golden anniversary even more successful than your silver, but before that savagery begins let’s […]
Why JMW Turner was a cussed and creepy genius
There are two Turners. One of them is public property, a national treasure whose face we put on our banknotes and whose ship paintings we habitually place at the top of our lists of favourite pictures. He is the Turner whose anniversaries we celebrate officially and whose quarter millennial appearance in our midst we are […]
I’ve got skin in this game — surely it’s time we celebrated the Poles
Did you know that Britain and Poland are celebrating an intense cultural exchange? That between now and November more than 100 events are taking place across both nations as we touch fingers above the great European divide, like God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling? There’s even a logo for the initiative: a sweet rectangle […]
If you want to torture an enemy, send them to Tate Britain
It was a perfect spring day. The sky was blue; the air was crisp. In the gardens the magnolias and cherry trees had sprung into uplifting blossom. It felt good to be alive. Until I reached Tate Britain. Among our important public galleries, none today feels as unwelcoming, unhappy, mistargeted and badly run as the […]