Seven women
The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in…
Privates on parade
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the…
Written in stone
‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’…
The artist’s artist
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
Away with all the flesh
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
A world apart
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
Palpable and palpatable
Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with…
A frantic collector of views
‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The…
Emancipation man
Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne
Space oddities
‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the…
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
The dying of the light
Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents…
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
Wet wet wet
In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to…
Northern exposure
When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The…
Old cud and fleshy frumps
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
The lonely path to herohood
Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen…
Blowing hot and cold
A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window…
Saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
Around the world in 80 studios
Picture the artist’s studio: if what comes to mind is the romantic image of a male painter at his easel…
Gothic horror meets Acorn Antiques
Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
An artist of the floating world
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
Brought to book
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…
