Categories for Art history

How to Read Paintings: At the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse-Lautrec

This scene shows a group of friends in the bar of the Moulin Rouge. The figures socialise against a backdrop... View Article

The Artwork That Inspired My Debut Novel

How one work of art can give rise to another I’ve admired this painting for more than 20 years. I... View Article

What is a Museum?

Cultural encyclopedia or appropriated plunder? I recently took a trip to Athens in Greece. Whilst I was there I visited... View Article

Can Art Clean Up Dirty Money?

In the Guggenheim, New York, people are throwing down a confetti of paper flyers from the famous curved balconies of... View Article

How Digital Changes the Nature of Original Art

The strange relationship between museum objects and the digital copies we make of them Today, it is possible to walk... View Article

Paul Klee’s Tunisia Trip

One of my favourite artists is the Swiss-German painter Paul Klee. In 1914, Klee took a two-week trip to Tunisia,... View Article

Picasso, Primitivism, And Cultural Appropriation

When artists adopt, do they also oppress? The first time I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York I... View Article

Social Media and The Gaze

The act of gazing brings people into new relationships. The angles and meeting points of looking and seeing imply distinctions... View Article

Review of “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” at Tate Britain

There is nothing commemorative about this remarkably diverse exhibition, which attempts to trace the activities of a number of London-based... View Article

Memory’s Work: The Art of Toba Khedoori

The appeal of Toba Khedoori’s work lies, perhaps, in the enigmatic precision with which her images are made. It lends... View Article

Mark Dion at the Whitechapel Gallery, London

For our modern age – prone to jump to the defence of science, of data-driven evidence – there is something... View Article

David Milne at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

The Canadian artist David Milne was born in 1882. By all accounts he was a modest man with a leaning... View Article

Coventry Railway Station: A Murky Masterpiece

I’ve never been sure about Coventry railway station. Bold perpendicular lines of grey concrete, shifting mezzanine levels, fierce observance to... View Article

Gursky likes to print his images on very large scale paper. Think Monet’s water lily series at the Orangerie, Paris. So as you approach a work it fills your horizontal field of vision. As well as enveloping you, the technique also has the effect of encouraging you to forget about edges of the picture, to disregard what lies beyond, and to overlook the very deliberate cropping that Gursky undertakes.

Review of ‘The Human Document: The Photography of Persuasion from 1930s America to Present Day’ at Mead Gallery, Coventry

There are few social-documentary photographs more well known, nor more heavily plundered for significance, than those of rural America from... View Article