‘The laws of the colours are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental,’ Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo. ‘One can speak poetry just by arranging colours well.’ Van Gogh’s...
Barcelona’s Champions League semi-final at the Camp Nou stadium this spring was watched by a crowd of more than ninety thousand, and some of the games in this Euros have had viewing figures a hundred...
Nietzsche referred to Wagner as the ‘Orpheus of all secret misery’, able to illuminate psychological states through the smallest glance, gesture or turn of phrasing. The composer whose name has become...
It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a narrative raised on sweet tea...
If her work has been admired, it has sometimes come at a cost to her philosophy. Ruth Asawa’s statements about the therapeutic nature of art-making are usually glossed over by curators, as is the proximity...
The boomerang that hit Documenta Fifteen had a secondary trajectory: having travelled across continents and generations, European antisemitism had returned home in the altered guise of an anti-colonial...
Edvard Munch seems especially concerned with beginnings and endings. This awareness isolated him. He couldn’t live in the present because it was always overshadowed by the past or by the future. He found...
Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...
Basketball players are larger than life – the average NBA player is six and a half feet tall. Going to a game is like entering an episode of Star Trek in which the Enterprise has landed on a planet that...
Charles Ray’s sculptures seem to capture the moment before our perception fixes, before we recognise a form for what it represents: a torso, a body, a woman or man. This is what looking at sculpture...
Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....
Breton called Magritte the ‘cuckoo’s egg’ of Surrealism, and though his work did eventually hatch in the Surrealist nest, he had little interest, as a very calculated painter, in Surrealist practices...
Part of what is interesting, or unsettling, in Maeve Gilmore’s work is her use of contrasts: not only in terms of colour and pattern, but also in her symbolism. The mood of Boys in Orchard is melancholy,...
The prints in Un Village suggest that Madeleine de Sinéty was eager to be part of the network of social relations she discovered in Poilley, the manners and protocols of village life, its rhythms of labour...
EastEnders is not, or not only, a slice-of-life drama. Like all soap operas, like all operas, it repeatedly oversteps the limit. The idea of ‘digging the dirt’ is given a whole new meaning, as if the...
The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...
Children have some of the best lines in Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski and following not very hard on the heels of the original, which came out in 1986. When Penny Benjamin...
In July 2007 I drove west from New Haven for eight hours to Getzville, north of Buffalo, to meet Magda Cordell. She was then in her eighties; I wanted to ask her about life as an artist in...