Arts & Culture

We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but...

The world exceeds us. It comes to us out of darkness. The cave is the universe, the nightly presence of that unknown glitter. What is it, this blackness? Where are they, the lights? Are they, is it, plural...

Catherine Breillat is an intellectual filmmaker. Her films pose ethical questions about desire and aesthetic questions about representation; in particular, they ask how explicit cinema can be without...

I don’t​ remember when I first learned to make cyanotypes, but I had loved Anna Atkins’s prints for many years when I found myself in the grip of an obsession with her work, and with...

‘Our press you know, is to give birth to every monster in the vicinity,’ Virginia Woolf told Clive Bell. Hogarth’s next three publications would be Mansfield’s Prelude (1918),...

Steven Spielberg uses the extraterrestrial as a stand-in for almost anything strange. It’s not always a virtue, but there may be interesting thoughts behind the ragged obvious ones. Think of the...

Zurbarán has always seemed to me an engaging but second division painter. Seeing many of his paintings across all the genres together, I realised I was wrong. They are mesmerising.

In 1848, the US seized the northern half of Mexico, from California to New Mexico, and imposed American law and the English language – a reminder that most of what is now the United States of America...

The music Bernard Herrmann wrote for The Wrong Man is diffident, sometimes almost unnoticeable. His score for Hitchcock’s next film, Vertigo, is loud, lushly romantic and Wagnerian. But in some...

Bad magic attracts bad money. Brion Gysin had a preternatural instinct for the fluctuations of the art market, high-capitalist juju with its social and sexual entanglements as an extension of the souk....

Deindustrialisation was not a long, slow process but a very quick one, erasing whole occupations and transforming one community and family after another. Britain was still a manufacturing and distinctly...

Nigeria is a complicated recipient of Western largesse: elites welcome it so long as domestic players, for whom it may not have been intended, get their share. Among those elites are wealthy Nigerians...

Celia Paul’s writings give every impression of translucency and quivering confession; she is an artist of self-exposure, of hurt and sorrow, both on canvas and on the page. Her confidences inspire...

The Artists International Association created the sort of art which has had critical manure heaped on it since the 1940s: realist, figurative, agitational, achingly sincere. It was a product of the sort...

Marilyn Monroe’s image, after Warhol, is still encoded with a vulnerability we instantly recognise, which makes us want to save her or explain her all over again. The real Marilyn has been dust...

Baselitz did not make overtly political art. He felt that what mattered in painting existed on a deeper level than subject or style. His ‘degenerate’ work was not only a means of compensating...

Screwballs aren’t miserabilist-humanist comedies about learning to revel in imperfection; they’re comedies of fantasy and will. With enough conviction, craziness starts to make sense.

Sid Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new country’,...