John-Paul Stonard

In his biography​ of the painter Chaïm Soutine, Monroe Wheeler tells the story of Soutine’s obsession with Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing of 1654, which shows his wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, standing in a pool of water, gingerly hitching up her skirt. Rather than copy the original, Soutine took the unorthodox approach of restaging the scene and painting his own version...

Visitors​ arrive in throngs at the National Palace Museum in Taipei from mainland China, queuing up to see the extraordinary collection of Chinese art: bronze, jade and ceramics, as well as painting and calligraphy, the best anywhere in the world. Taipei is the home of the old imperial collection, evacuated in 1933 from the Forbidden City before the fall of Beijing to the Japanese. After a...

Anselm Kiefer​ first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue for the first full retrospective in Britain, curated by Kathleen Soriano (until 14 December). Kiefer has always divided critics, some taking fright at his heavy Germanic imagery, others describing the...

The​ German painter Jörg Immendorff died in 2007, at the age of 61, after a long period suffering from motor neurone disease. His reputation had been tarnished by a scandal a few years earlier involving cocaine and prostitutes, but by this stage his artistic career had in any case already begun to falter; his late works never quite captured the success of his Café Deutschland...