Alice Neel liked to say that she painted all of a person: ‘What the world has done to them and their retaliation’. The opposite might be said of Amy Sherald: she seems less concerned with the bruised...

Golf lends itself to spectacle. There’s a special thrill to the shape of the perfectly hit shot, a kind of lingering, dreamy eloquence. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical,...

Orsanmichele market had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day...

Western critics take Jafar Panahi’s ‘banned’ status to mean that he cannot legally make films in Iran, but in fact it means that he can’t work with the state (not that he would want to) or access...

Rory McEwen’s work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious desire to please. It was in itself a perverse choice for an artist in the 1960s to take up flower...

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for...

Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement...

Richard Wright considered Paris a ‘city of refuge’. The city served as both sanctuary and training ground for some of America’s most important post-war black visual artists – artists whose auction...

In​ her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to...

During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible to...

The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and granted independence to Congo in 1960. Whatever it was called, it was a place where...

To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance...

‘I wanted to understand the figure of Riefenstahl in her development,’ Andres Veiel says, ‘without exculpating her in the process. Wanting to understand a person is not the same as looking at them...

Sienese painters adopted forms so distinct from those of their better-known Florentine neighbours that their work was not always appreciated for its idiosyncratic qualities. There is no single-point perspective,...

A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...

Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...

Victor Hugo​ was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...

Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...