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...
For Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry...
To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and her eyes and her gloriously melodic laugh seem instead to be saving you.
In September, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a...
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. Light hits the sculpture from the...
In all versions of the story a human competes with God by creating a living being. The difference in Guillermo del Toro’s version is that the creator doesn’t immediately freak out with horror...
To record the changing conventions of memorial sculpture is to trace the ways in which our ancestors affirmed their faith and stifled doubt, expressed their grief and placated guilt, contrived to assert...
Marshall’s work stirs up thoughts that don’t settle. Here’s discursive jujitsu, a categorisation flipped backwards. Here’s an artistic contender intent to brand his act. Here’s...
For a long stretch of her long life, Jean Rhys was thought to be dead: drowned in the Seine, they said. For some of it she was thought to be a fraud. ‘I feel rather tactless being still alive,’...
Rambunctious and often offensive, R. Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes, and always draws in the first person. Unlike any previous comic-strip artist (but not unlike a stand-up...
Although the events depicted in Resistance are familiar territory for an exhibition concerned with social history – the Great Depression, postwar immigration, Greenham Common, the...
The portrait that I came across so unexpectedly at Frieze Masters doesn’t have the prestige of the Van Dyck or the special interest of the self-portrait, but it is the image that comes to mind whenever...
Carl Gustav Carus made copies of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, or sought out the locations he had painted, producing works that are so close to the originals that they were often mistaken for them....
Beyond or beneath the theatrics there is a disconcerting sense that something much more serious is going on, that all the hokum and stage magic might be misdirection of the sort that enables something...
Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to...
It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Martin Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable. Too often the texture...
The title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with...
The mummy portraits are stunning. Their production began around 30-40 ce, sixty or so years after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and the beginning of Roman rule. This brought to an end almost...