Arts & Culture

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing...

Payne Knight’s greatest desire was that the British Museum would provide the public free access to an unrivalled resource for the study of antiquity and of art. His collection was, first and foremost,...

Linton Kwesi Johnson​ has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music ... is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration...

For a while, Leigh Bowery touted himself as a legitimate if outré fashion designer, but it’s clear from the Tate show that it was never going to work: he was too addicted to the one-off extravagance...

Erik Satie is the progenitor of torch songs and lounge music, systems music and minimalism, even (with his later innovation, ‘musique d’ameublement’) muzak and ambient music. Mahler’s influence,...

Paris was Agnès Varda’s working milieu for most of her life. She approached it at times like a canny native informant, at others like a child enchanted by a sprawling circus whose routines changed from...

Alice Neel liked to say that she painted all of a person: ‘What the world has done to them and their retaliation’. The opposite might be said of Amy Sherald: she seems less concerned with the bruised...

Golf lends itself to spectacle. There’s a special thrill to the shape of the perfectly hit shot, a kind of lingering, dreamy eloquence. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical,...

Orsanmichele market had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day...

Rory McEwen’s work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious desire to please. It was in itself a perverse choice for an artist in the 1960s to take up flower...

Western critics take Jafar Panahi’s ‘banned’ status to mean that he cannot legally make films in Iran, but in fact it means that he can’t work with the state (not that he would want to) or access...

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for...

Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement...

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...

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...

During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible to...

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...

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...