Arts & Culture

Like darkness, light at its most powerful could disorientate, overpower, blind the senses. Joseph Wright of Derby’s contemporary viewers associated his night pieces with a kind of sublime unclarity,...

Art in Tudor England was more than just decoration. Occupants of a precarious throne, passed down through a series of unexpected heirs (the second son, a minor, two daughters), English monarchs of the...

Like Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, which had a similarly successful run last year, The Secret Agent is set during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Unlike Salles’s film, however, Kleber Mendonça...

The absence of critical or fresh perspectives on Egyptology and its history, or any of the decolonial approaches that are debated by archaeologists and Egyptologists today, subverts any claims for restitution....

The artistic gift of Fatima Haddad – who chose to be known as Baya – was quickly celebrated. But celebration was entwined with and shadowed by bewildered awe. The painter was a girl. She was young....

For Barnett Newman, what was required was a new kind of painting produced ‘as if painting never existed before’, a painting that would convey the exaltation of its making in the moment of its viewing,...

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...