Royal academy
Wonderfully intimate: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, at the RA, reviewed
You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he…
Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?
A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they…
How a single year in Florence changed art forever
The story goes that one day early in the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci was strolling through Florence with a…
How Michael Craig-Martin changed a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree
‘Of all the things I’ve drawn,’ Michael Craig-Martin reflects, ‘to me chairs are one of the most interesting.’ We are…
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
The playful portraitist
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred…
A world apart
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
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…
Wild at heart
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
Stitched up
The Royal Academy, a witch-hunt and me
Rare and precious
Martin Gayford explains why the Royal Academy would be wrong to sell Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
…and of looking at real pictures again
One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1888 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went for a walk. They headed…
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
Paper, paper everywhere
Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them —……
No masterpieces but there are beautiful touches: Félix Vallotton at the RA reviewed
Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a problematically loose agglomeration of painters, inspired by Gauguin…
Full of lovely paintings that might lead you astray: The Renaissance Nude reviewed
Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in…
Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural wonderland reigns supreme at the Royal Academy
‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The…
The odd couple: Bill Viola / Michelangelo at the RA reviewed
The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable…
Full of fabulous, but baffling, things: Oceania reviewed
At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As…
How lucky we are to have the Royal Academy
What is the Royal Academy? This question set me thinking as I wandered through the crowds that celebrated the opening…
A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed
Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of…
It’s the thought that counts
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
Object lesson
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
Repeat prescription
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
