Eleanor Birne

The first picture​ you come across in Tate Modern’s vast and various exhibition Performing for the Camera (until 12 June) is Yves Klein’s arresting and now iconic Leap into the Void (1960). It’s the jumping-off point for the whole show and it features the artist himself, well, jumping off. He’s throwing himself from a building in a suburban Paris street and is...

Sonia Delaunay​ – who designed clothes worn by Gloria Swanson and Nancy Cunard, whose bold zigzag textiles and liveried Citroën graced the cover of the January 1925 issue of Vogue, who consorted with Picasso, Derain and Braque and criticised all of them – was born in 1885 as Sara Stern, one of five children of a Jewish foreman in a nail factory in Odessa. But there was a...

If you​ walk through the main galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge just now you’ll find yourself on a creepy treasure hunt. A one-legged mannequin on a crutch rests near Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia. A pair of legs in suit trousers and shiny shoes, with bowler hat appended, reclines opposite a Signorelli. By Millais’s The Bridesmaid a long blonde wig has been...

When​ Ben Nicholson and Winifred Roberts got married, in 1920, they had everything they wanted: time and leisure to paint in, and enough of Winifred’s family money to travel wherever they liked. On their honeymoon they passed through Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Amalfi, Pisa, Portofino, Rapallo and Genoa. They rented – and later, with the help of Winifred’s father, a...

Pauline Boty, the only prominent female Pop artist among a generation of famous men, was a blonde beauty, described as a ‘goddess’ and likened by contemporaries to Brigitte Bardot. Others disagreed: she was more like Simone Signoret. ‘There were other beautiful girls who could paint at the time,’ the architect Edward Jones recalled, ‘but none who were quite as...