Arts & Culture

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...

Beyond or beneath the theatrics there is a disconcerting sense that something much more serious is going on, that all the hokum and stage magic might be misdirection of the sort that enables something...

Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that...

It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Martin Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable. Too often the texture of...

The mummy portraits are stunning. Their production began around 30-40 ce, sixty or so years after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and the beginning of Roman rule. This brought to an end almost...

Avigdor Arikha became the archivist of the everyday: not, it seems, because he sought out the ordinary but because each day invited his urgent attention. He spoke about ‘lying in ambush’ until a subject...

The film frame is both Walter Murch’s canvas and his found object. In his editing suite, whether mechanical or digital, he is painting with light and sound, looking for the emotional narrative ‘hook’...

In the late 1960s, the critic Bevis Hillier invented the term ‘Art Deco’ for the commercial architecture of the 1930s – it was used by nobody in that decade. Mid-Century Modern would have been called...

A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a philosophy to counter the accusation. Praising idleness sounds last century; instead, they...

The snapshots in my father’s book were taken during his first three years in London, after he emigrated from New Zealand with my mother. The picture shown here was taken at a Stepney street market....