The Savoy. It’s a typical September afternoon in London — cold, windy, overcast — and I’m spinning my way through the revolving door that marks the entrance to perhaps the world’s most famous hotel, accompanied by a conga of international rich folk returning from a hard day’s shopping. They are carrying elegant packages wrapped at […]
Recent articles
SpongeBob SquarePants hijacks the Royal Academy
Michael Craig-Martin is a hugely influential figure in British art. He has done really well out of it: CBE, knighthood and now a lengthy retrospective at the Royal Academy. What a shame he’s such a ghastly artist. His work is a trampling of the delicacies and visual charms of art. World-class insensitivity can, if arrived […]
Van Gogh at the National Gallery: masterpieces no one has ever matched
The exciting Vincent van Gogh show that has arrived at the National Gallery is packed with thrills and achievement. Everything at the event — 60 works, including many of his greatest — was produced in the two tumultuous years he spent in the south of France, from February 1888 to May 1890. It’s Van Gogh’s […]
The paintings Van Gogh always wanted to see together are reunited at last
There’s a Vincent van Gogh exhibition heading our way: a big one. It’s being hailed by its venue, the National Gallery, as a “once-in-a-century event” and will include more than 60 pictures by art’s most anxiously exciting painter. Everything in the show was made in the south of France during Van Gogh’s short but astonishingly […]
When art turns its guns on politicians
We appear to be living through a golden age of political protest in art. OK, perhaps “golden age” is pushing it. But it’s definitely a fine time for artistic moaning. Pretty much every day on what was Twitter and now is X, the energetic agitator Cold War Steve (the pen name of Christopher Spencer) is laying into […]
Tracey Emin leads a mutiny against the art schools
When Tracey Emin first appeared among us — mouthy, disruptive, selfish, often drunk, a terrible speller — no one could have imagined that one day she would open her own art school and that this art school would nurse ambitions that are traditional and nostalgic. But there you go. With time comes wisdom, and with […]
Louise Bourgeois: the mother of all artists and the grooviest seventysomething
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists to have lived. I was only there for the tail end of her career but, absurdly, that was when all the action happened. She had been inventive, emotional, hair-raising and brilliant for many decades of her long creative life, but only in the final stretches […]
From painting murals of Saddam Hussein to shaking up Blenheim Palace
Against all the odds, the marriage of Mohammed Sami and Blenheim Palace turns out to be made in heaven. It’s against the odds because Sami is a 40-year-old from Baghdad who has ended up in London while Blenheim is a particularly posh and gigantic stately home, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, the birthplace […]
Henry VIII was a lunatic. We beheaded the wrong king
The cry goes out across the land. It whistles across the heather and rumbles through the tenements: “Who will rid us of these troublesome Tudors?” I mean, really. As a nation, have we not already lavished as much attention as can reasonably be lavished on Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives? And his malignant children? […]
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine review — art meets politics
The tiny shred of good that has come out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the raising of awareness it has prompted of this fascinating and crucial corner of Europe. Before Putin began his mad war, many among us would have had difficulty pointing to Ukraine on the map, let alone understanding its […]