Arts & Culture

This​ is a fabulous book, beautiful, generous, sombre and wise, a wistful romance about a man writing a book like Always Crashing in the Same Car. Don’t fall for that subtitle...

Joel Coen’s​ The Tragedy of Macbeth takes its cue from the witches. Or, rather, its one witch, played by Kathryn Hunter, who multiplies herself when she feels like it. Early in the film...

It’s easy to see why St Jerome in His Study was popular – Albrecht Dürer asks us to look into the eyes of the Church Father, close to death, contemplating his life and its labours. But...

There is something unsettling about the way Rosemary Mayer’s sculptures shift as you walk around them. They move on the air currents, changing colour with the light. Up close, they reveal the...

In conventional terms, Solange possesses the ‘weaker’ voice by far – so why is it those passages in ‘Stay Flo’, say, when Solange’s voice is just pure keening vocalese,...

In​ his introduction to the first edition of The Buildings of England: Wiltshire (1963), Nikolaus Pevsner wrote with barely contained anger thatWiltshire would be as wonderful as it must have...

Fragonard represents the sexual encounter as a physical act that absorbs the couple entirely, taking them beyond society: their arms enlaced and their faces, joined by a kiss, obscured from the viewer. In...

Helen Frankenthaler’s work is often described as light and lyrical, but it has a solemnity. Details yield like little shocks. Recognisable forms emerge and disappear again. You might see a butterfly,...

‘Abeginning​ is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time...

Reading books like this, I feel like a Philip K. Dick character in the grip of wild-eyed madness. I want to run around telling the authors to snap out of it, to stop wasting their time and their Sontag...

However esoteric, these paintings were intended to be seen: Goya thrilled visitors to his house with scenes inspired not just by his own fantasies, but also by the magic lantern shows and phantasmagorias...

 It was a festival of Nike socks, North Face joggers, Calvin Klein T-shirts and scooped up hair. It wasn’t a Glasgow I’m accustomed to seeing. The hall was littered with pumpkins, baskets...

As a student, I was always taught to look rather than to think, but still life painting seems to confound this wisdom; moments of intense scrutiny so often yield disappointing results. Could it be that...

The​ great realisation of the Stan Lee era at Marvel was that heroes didn’t need to be paragons. They could be anxious teenagers with money worries, like Spider-Man, or members of a bickering...

Art historians often ask where the saints and the Virgin are and what are they doing in altarpieces, especially those, common in Venice, in which the painted space seems an architectural extension behind...

Probably with Magritte in mind, André Breton once offered the image of ‘a man cut in two by a window’ as the paragon of the Surrealist picture. This is close to what Jasper Johns presents:...

I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as she...

Many​ of the works in The Making of Rodin, currently on show at Tate Modern (until 21 November), are displayed on what look like the packing cases in which they arrived. A notice on the wall...