There are many artists I would expect to play a leading role — the leading role — in the momentous relaunch of the National Portrait Gallery, but Tracey Emin isn’t one of them. Not in a million years, frankly. One issue is that she’s not a portrait artist. Not in any previous incarnation of the […]

I was looking forward to The Offbeat Sari for primitive reasons: I have a problem with holey jeans. Every time I see someone in the street with custom-made tears in their expensive new pants I guffaw. We must be the first society in human history to spend wads of wampum on looking poorer than we are. The […]

Searching for words to describe the Gwen John exhibition that has arrived at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, I tried the old Freudian trick of writing down the first words that came to mind. Out popped: sensitive, religious, private. Which will annoy the show’s curator, Alicia Foster. She would rather I had written: thrusting, […]

Saint Francis of Assisi at the National Gallery in London is a happy-clappy affair replete with sugar-coated religiosity and a level of investigative ambition worthy of the under-tens class at a Sunday school. What’s to blame? The coronation moment? Internal confusion at the National about critical standards? Beats me. What I do know is that the […]

The best thing about the obsession with identity that currently drives art is the array of new voices it has forced into the open. At both extremes of art’s spectrum — old masters at the beginning, ultra contemporaries at our end — we are encountering an expanded cast. True, the me, me, meism on the […]

The gods of art are at it again. For reasons lost somewhere deep in the annals of humanity these mischievous imps of heaven love to stir and poke and confuse. And in the past couple of weeks, what fun they’ve been having. First they arranged for Tate Britain to unveil a floor-to-ceiling rehang, the first […]

Your Majesty, Forgive the early hour of this missive. The butler may not have had a chance yet to brush the royal teeth and the new crown is still perched, I imagine, on the bedside table, next to the royal reading glasses. But there’s an old Polish saying that advises, “Kick your horse at the […]

Most of the trickiest questions in art are impossible to answer. Who’s the greatest painter of all time? Who produced the best landscapes? Don’t ask me. I haven’t a clue. Art is a universe of subtleties. But there is one question to which not only I but everyone else in the art world immediately knows […]

For proof of how rapidly tastes change in art, I recommend a visit to the unlikely pairing of Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian at Tate Modern. What a turn up! Ten years ago this show would have been impossible. Five years ago it would have been improbable. Today it is fully on the button, […]

If you put a gun to my head, pushed me against a lamppost and demanded I name my favourite art movement, I would probably splutter: “Post-impressionism.” It’s the one that presses my buzzers most firmly. My biggest buzzer, the macro buzzer, responds to the overall impact of a movement. The simple truth here is that […]