Joseph Beuys

English National Opera's triumphant new production of Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Daniel Kramer. [Photo: Alistair Muir]

A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed

26 October 2019 9:00 am

ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in…

‘Merde d’Artiste’, 1961, by Piero Manzoni

In defence of conceptual art

16 April 2016 9:00 am

At the tail end of last year, an artist called Peter Goodfellow mounted an exhibition of paintings titled Treason of…

‘Wall Street, New York’, 1915, by Paul Strand

The counterfeiters

26 March 2016 9:00 am

One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street…

Yoko Ono performing ‘Cut Piece’, where her outfit is cut down to her underwear by predatory snipping scissors

The fine art of bluffing

7 February 2015 9:00 am

My career at school and after was greatly enhanced by a series of books called The Bluffer’s Guide to….These gave…

‘Interior (Innenraum)’, 1981, by Anselm Kiefer

Master of alchemy

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Martin Gayford talks to a surprisingly jolly Anselm Kiefer about art and metamorphosis