Arts & Culture

Lam referred to a ‘desire to include in my painting all the transculturation that had occurred in Cuba’ – using a term coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the island’s...

If we imagine Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings as depending on what we might call a ‘cruising eye’ – one that focuses on instances of men watching men, and also instantiates the act of watching...

What is it with these Dutchmen? Did human subjects not exist before them? Did they write the book on patience? (All those letters being written and read, those prayers being said, those scholars at their...

There is much room for improvement in today’s maternity care, but few in Britain would choose to give birth in 1506 rather than 2026, and an ultrasound, though magical in its way, is more useful than...

Almost everything about Wuthering Heights – the artistic photography, the heavy orchestral music, the gestures and speech of the actors – signals the ambitions of a director seeking interesting effects....

Although she often responded to questions with anecdotes and talked about the role of chance and the necessity of pragmatism, Chantal Akerman was a fine theorist of her own work. She couldn’t understand...

Schubert’s​ imagination was unusually literary. Words released music in him: poems about desire, love, loss, solitude, the longing for rest; narrative ballads; philosophical poems; theological poems;...

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,...