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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. […]

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 […]

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, 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Halfway through my conversation with David Hockney I hit on a sure-fire way of making pots of money. It’s so good, I may take it on to Dragons’ Den. I’m going to manufacture some mini-Hockneys — tiny wind-up Davids that fit in your pocket — and every time you are feeling gloomy or in need of […]

Edvard Munch’s misfortune was to produce his masterpiece when he was 30 and then spend the next 50 years trying to match the achievement. And failing. The result is an iceberg-shaped career with a shiny bit poking out of the water and a massive slab of sunken effort lurking under the surface. The masterpiece was, […]

I’m stomping through the mean streets of north London with my phone map beeping, searching for a nondescript door with a nondescript number. Behind that door is Grayson Perry. Unfortunately, the phone map is lost, so there’s time to blunder and fret about the confrontation ahead: Grayson Perry. Who the hell is he? On the […]