Rosa Bonheur exemplifies the problem of the ‘exceptional’ woman painter, whose extraordinary success was interpreted as an anomaly. She styled herself as a Romantic genius like George Sand,...
From a distance some panels resemble a deconstructed frieze, or funerary stele. As you draw closer, you become aware of the many strange marriages and collisions. Aby Warburg believed that modernity was...
He disliked autograph-hounds and being identified wherever he went – but he would have been lost without these things. When a passerby told him he didn’t look like Cary Grant,...
Some days appear as condensed photo-essays (taxi cabs, sunsets, newsstands, parking lots, luminous white clouds), visual counterparts to her riffs on colour and sensation. In Bernadette Mayer’s...
It’s not the main function of great fictional characters to provide platforms for the careers of others, but they do the job very well. In a new film, Sherlock Holmes walks into...
Fish sleep with their eyes open: not our kind of sleep, more like our kind of daydream. Awake but not awake, just like me; living to eat and conserve energy, just like me; devoid of answers, just like...
Dada invited outrage – its primary aim was to shock people out of aesthetic complacency – and to this day many art lovers dismiss Duchamp and company as so much blague. But Walter Serner ups...
Before tennis, most sports were enjoyed because they were pleasurable to play, but tennis created space for a new kind of participant: the spectator (more people in the world today play badminton than...
What was this nonsense all about? What about Marc Almond’s ‘Sex Dwarf’? What happened to the youth-club boys in their mothers’ ruffled blouses tottering around in heels and shouting...
The idea of dismantling such an intricate historical building, transporting it across the ocean and recreating it in an institution may seem anachronistic, even reckless. But the architectural ethos behind...
It’s not that Ken Burns’s documentaries are as conservative formally as they end up being politically. It’s that, inadvertently, the two end up being one and the same. If you’re...
From 1931 until the outbreak of war, Hampstead was the home of an emerging progressivism in art – not quite radical, a little domestic in fact, and also in thrall to the bolder experiments taking...
The coming together of Cézanne and Pissarro – their common cause, their peaceful coexistence, their rivalry, their contrariety – is a mystery. For me it is the deepest mystery of...
A British equivalent of Fox News, wherever it may come from, would have its own distinctive character – less evangelism and more Elgar, fewer guns and more poppies – but the commercial and...
The meanings of its title sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of...
‘I represent things as I see them,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the...
The young Americans who heard something in Kraftwerk didn’t identify with the moneyed ease and ruffled shirtfronts of mainstream disco, or see any kind of career in old-school supper-club soul. In...
‘The new art is really a business,’ Warhol said in 1969. ‘We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market.’ This didn’t endear him to some. ‘You’re...