Arts & Culture

Georges de La Tour’s scan of the visual field is a stark, bold testing out of basic facets of experience. What is it to face another human, when that person cannot see you? What are humans if not tall...

Most of the characters in Marty Supreme believe their lives are a kind of movie, and when a character speaks of ‘theatre’ he is not talking about a building but about the agitated world he lives in....

Many brass bands were started by factory owners in the belief that music would give their workers purpose, strengthen social bonds and discourage violence and disorder. Outside the industrial heartlands,...

Faced with a parade of flushed Madonnas and anguished Christs, it would be easy to think that Fra Angelico was somehow apart from the intellectual and interdisciplinary advances we associate with the Renaissance....

What must it have been like to live cheek by jowl with the man you’d cuckolded? In the early 19th century, for a woman’s cavalier servente to occupy the same household as her husband was not uncommon,...

For Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry...

To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and her eyes and her gloriously melodic laugh seem instead to be saving you.

In September​, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a rail of clothes...

It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. Light hits the sculpture from the left...

In all versions of the story a human competes with God by creating a living being. The difference in Guillermo del Toro’s version is that the creator doesn’t immediately freak out with horror when...

To record the changing conventions of memorial sculpture is to trace the ways in which our ancestors affirmed their faith and stifled doubt, expressed their grief and placated guilt, contrived to assert...

Marshall’s work stirs up thoughts that don’t settle. Here’s discursive jujitsu, a categorisation flipped backwards. Here’s an artistic contender intent to brand his act. Here’s a fresh and unfamiliar...

For a long stretch of her long life, Jean Rhys was thought to be dead: drowned in the Seine, they said. For some of it she was thought to be a fraud. ‘I feel rather tactless being still alive,’ she...

Rambunctious and often offensive, R. Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes, and always draws in the first person. Unlike any previous comic-strip artist (but not unlike a stand-up...

Although the events depicted in Resistance are familiar territory for an exhibition concerned with social history – the Great De­pres­sion, postwar immigrat­ion, Greenham Common, the miners’ strike...

The portrait that I came across so unexpectedly at Frieze Masters doesn’t have the prestige of the Van Dyck or the special interest of the self-portrait, but it is the image that comes to mind whenever...

Carl Gustav Carus made copies of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, or sought out the locations he had painted, producing works that are so close to the originals that they were often mistaken for them....

The​ title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with the double meaning...