Arts & Culture

Beauford Delaney’s portrait of Marian Anderson (1965)

‘Paris Noir’

Adam Shatz

26 June 2025

Richard Wright considered Paris a ‘city of refuge’. The city served as both sanctuary and training ground for some of America’s most important post-war black visual artists – artists whose auction sales remained quite modest, until the George Floyd protests led previously indifferent collectors to ‘discover’ black modernism.

Read more about At the Pompidou: ‘Paris Noir’

On Richard Hunt

Gazelle Mba

26 June 2025

The sculptor​ Richard Hunt was nineteen years old when he looked into Emmett Till’s casket. It was September 1955. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had called on mourners to witness and grieve for . . .

Sinnermen

Niela Orr

26 June 2025

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners is (so far) the pop cultural sensation of the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish . . .

Refugee Artists

Jonathan Meades

26 June 2025

There are​, of course, the huddled masses, nameless, deprived of family, possessions, hope, dignity, wrapped in ragged blankets of despair, worn and punished for their very existence. And then there . . .

The Best-Paid Woman in NYC

Francesca Wade

26 June 2025

In​ her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to . . .

Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

Anne Carson, 6 March 2025

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.

Read more about Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

Picasso and Tragedy

T.J. Clark, 17 August 2017

Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.

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Swoonatra

Ian Penman, 2 July 2015

Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.

Read more about Swoonatra

Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.

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At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.

Read more about At the End of My Pencil

It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

Gilberto Perez, 27 June 2002

A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.

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Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.

Read more about Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

The Raphael Question

Lawrence Gowing, 15 March 1984

When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...

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Dressing and Undressing

Anita Brookner, 15 April 1982

Fashion,​ according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...

Read more about Dressing and Undressing

The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and granted independence to Congo in 1960. Whatever it was called, it was a place where...

Read more about Paths to Restitution: Leopold’s Legacy

Pinstriped Tycoon: Siege Art

Hal Foster, 5 June 2025

To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance...

Read more about Pinstriped Tycoon: Siege Art

At the Movies: ‘Riefenstahl’

Michael Wood, 5 June 2025

‘I wanted to understand the figure of Riefenstahl in her development,’ Andres Veiel says, ‘without exculpating her in the process. Wanting to understand a person is not the same as looking at them...

Read more about At the Movies: ‘Riefenstahl’

Sienese painters adopted forms so distinct from those of their better-known Florentine neighbours that their work was not always appreciated for its idiosyncratic qualities. There is no single-point perspective,...

Read more about At the National Gallery: Painting in Siena

At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Rosemary Hill, 22 May 2025

A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...

Read more about At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...

Read more about Cool Tricking: Terrence Malick melts away

Victor Hugo​ was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...

Read more about At the Royal Academy: Victor Hugo’s Drawings

Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...

Read more about R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Pang: Mondrian goes dancing

At Crufts

Rosa Lyster, 22 May 2025

Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers...

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At the Barbican: On Noah Davis

Emily LaBarge, 8 May 2025

Noah Davis’s work is distinguished by a revelry and a commitment to the figures he brings into his image world. There are few non-Black subjects here. That in itself was a political choice, as well as...

Read more about At the Barbican: On Noah Davis

At the Movies: ‘La Haine’

Michael Wood, 8 May 2025

‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the...

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Diary: Whitney lives!

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 May 2025

I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency...

Read more about Diary: Whitney lives!

We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time.  The apparent...

Read more about The Face You Put On: Victorian Snapshots

Alasdair Gray’s illustrations tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of...

Read more about At the Whisky Bond: The Alasdair Gray Archive

At the Movies: ‘Mickey 17’

Michael Wood, 3 April 2025

Edward Ashton’s​ novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave...

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At Pallant House: On Dora Carrington

Rosemary Hill, 3 April 2025

Insofar as Dora Carrington has had a wider reputation, it has rested chiefly on her landscapes. In 2014, Farm at Watendlath (1921) came second in a poll to find the most popular works in British museums....

Read more about At Pallant House: On Dora Carrington

On Drawing

Julian Bell, 3 April 2025

While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead:...

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At the British Museum: Picasso’s Prints

Francis Gooding, 20 March 2025

Picasso’s perpetual object is the human body, which is everywhere remodelled, schematised and simplified, rendered breathtakingly beautiful one moment and grotesquely ugly the next, and always treated...

Read more about At the British Museum: Picasso’s Prints

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