Arts & Culture

Cassandra Darke, 2018 © Posy Simmonds

On Posy Simmonds

Susannah Clapp

7 March 2024

Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.

Read more about At the Pompidou: On Posy Simmonds

On the Wall

Nicholas Penny

7 March 2024

When​ the London Tube emerges into daylight, the walls beside the tracks are laced with dark, dirty and dangerous-looking cables, but at intervals we may glimpse clusters of bold letters sprayed in brilliant . . .

On the Red Carpet

David Thomson

7 March 2024

For​ years now, the television audience for the Oscars has been in decline. In 2023, the Academy’s big night had 18.7 million viewers; in 1998, the Titanic year, it was 57 million. This is getting . . .

Rave On

Chal Ravens

7 March 2024

On​ 21 July 1990 a rave ended in the biggest mass arrest in British history. To get to Love Decade, as the party was called, you first had to call a telephone hotline, which disclosed the location of . . .

On VAR

Ben Walker

22 February 2024

On​ the baseball fields of America in the first half of the 20th century Bill Klem was the law. As an umpire between 1905 and 1941 he worked eighteen World Series. His nickname was the Old Arbitrator . . .

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.

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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.

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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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That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Michael Wood, 7 September 2000

‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...

Read more about That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

‘Be modern – worship food,’ exhorts the cover of The Official Foodie Handbook. One of the ironies resulting from the North/South dichotomy of our planet is the appearance of this...

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...

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Fans and Un-Fans

Ferdinand Mount, 22 February 2024

In its modern incarnations, sport is a spontaneous thing, blowing wherever the fans fancy. Even the impulses that have transformed Britain into a nation of joggers and gym bunnies remain mysterious. They...

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At the Movies: ‘The Zone of Interest’

Michael Wood, 22 February 2024

It’s not that the locals are in denial about what is going on in the camp. Everyone seems to have incorporated the horrors as real but ignorable aspects of regular existence. Höss and Hedwig not only...

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The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic...

Read more about Clunk, Clack, Swish: Watching the Snooker

At the Kunsthalle: On Caspar David Friedrich

Michael Hofmann, 8 February 2024

You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no...

Read more about At the Kunsthalle: On Caspar David Friedrich

In Surrey Quays

Owen Hatherley, 8 February 2024

By the 1950s Scandinavian design principles dominated British architecture schools, and were taken to be the natural model for the new towns, new housing estates and new universities. The frustrated young...

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At the Barnes: On Marie Laurencin

Bridget Alsdorf, 25 January 2024

Marie Laurencin’s independence and her refusal to pander to her patrons only makes her more compelling as a ‘femme peintre’. Like Helena Rubinstein and Coco Chanel, she was ambitious and not always...

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At the Movies: ‘Poor Things’

Michael Wood, 25 January 2024

Is Bella Baxter an unruly kind of feminist? Yes, in a way, but before we make this claim we need to understand what else she is – principally an uninformed child in an adult body. 

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As always in Guston, there is a sense of what cannot be shown, or has been erased, and can only be gestured towards: ropes instead of lynchings, clubs and sticks instead of beatings. But the props look...

Read more about I smell mink coats: Philip Guston goes rogue

Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked...

Read more about At the Cluny: ‘Voyage dans le cristal’

Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned...

Read more about Do Anything, Say Anything: On the New TV

I don’t know what it looks like: Brutalist Paris

Madeleine Schwartz, 14 December 2023

Although they were designed to elevate the periphery by decentring the city, the villes nouvelles achieved the opposite effect: alienating a rapidly impoverished ring from the core. The suburban monorail...

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At the Movies: ‘Napoleon’

Michael Wood, 14 December 2023

In spite of various attempts to make Napoleon work as a biopic, the film doesn’t have a bio. It has a general of genius, something like a sports figure who is alive only in games or tournaments. 

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On Yevonde

Susannah Clapp, 14 December 2023

When​ Yevonde made the new case for colour in photography, she also made the case for women behind the camera, controlling the views. Who better to advance the art and push colour into a black and white...

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At Piano Nobile: On R.B. Kitaj

John-Paul Stonard, 14 December 2023

R.B. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he also drew on the photographic reproductions that transformed art books during his lifetime, particularly...

Read more about At Piano Nobile: On R.B. Kitaj

Diary: Aboriginal Voices

Rosemary Hill, 14 December 2023

The defeat of The Voice leaves Aboriginal culture stuck in the same queasy relationship to the white nation and its essentially European notion of history that it has been in since the early 20th century,...

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One​ of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling...

Read more about Hickup over the Littany: What did it sound like?

Monet was always more than just an eye. He was a painter of heart and brain, feeling and memory. Late in life, when working on his Water Lilies, he told his friend Gustave Geffroy: ‘They’re beyond...

Read more about Painting is terribly difficult: Myths about Monet

Go for it, losers: Werner Herzog’s Visions

David Trotter, 30 November 2023

Documentary has customarily been regarded as a genre duty-bound to deal in facts. But the only duty Herzog has ever felt as a filmmaker is, as he puts it, to ‘follow a grand vision’.

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