Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
The great pretenders
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection…
The playful portraitist
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred…
Breaking the rules
Rules in art exist to be broken but it takes chutzpah, which could explain why so many rule-breakers in modern…
Cutting edge
There’s a nice irony to the title Salon Paintings when the salon in question is a barbershop, an irony that…
Shatterer of glass ceilings
Reviewing the Prado’s joint exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana in the Art Newspaper three years ago, Brian Allen…
Station to station
Exiting Peckham Rye station, you’re not aware of it, but standing on the platform you can see a mansard roof…
Ladies first
In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the…
A saint for all seasons
Laura Gascoigne on the pulling power of St Francis of Assisi
The yin and yang of abstraction
In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World…
The hair and now
‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable…
Hounds of love
Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed,…
Dotty and daffy
Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part…
Art for art’s sake – and then some
It’s payback time: women, artists from ethnic minorities and non-western traditions are taking over the exhibition schedules. On the heels…
Sea fever
In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for…
Haunted habitats
You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for…
Swimming against the tide
If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old…
Who’s that girl?
Laura Gascoigne on Vermeer’s women
The only way is Sussex
In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when…
A crash course in all things Hispanic
‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish…
Worlds gone mad
‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media…
Crocks of gold
There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of…
The stuff that dreams are made of
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
Northern star
Laura Gascoigne on the shadowy Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, whose painting in the Uffizi upstages the masterpieces of Botticelli
A painter of rural doings
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of…
