Prints

Van Gogh owned a copy of Utagawa Kunisada’s woodblock print of the ‘Yoshiwara Poet Omatsu’ (1861), which is currently on display at the Watts Gallery. It depicts the poetess who rose from humble origins in an elegant kimono at her dressing table and was part of Kunisada’s series of paintings titled Biographies of Famous Women, Ancient and Modern, but Van Gogh may not have known that. By the time he started amassing Japanese prints – he splurged on 600 of them in the winter of 1886 – they had become collectibles sought after by avant-garde artists for their clear lines, bright colours and the immediacy of their cropped figure compositions

Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gifts bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘Effort upon effort,’ is how she described the process of painting to her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer. Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was her true mentor Still, she produced almost 1,000 works in her lifetime, and Mary Cassatt at Work – a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – tells us

By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese merchants years earlier, but it wasn’t until the early 19th century that those outside of the imperial court could afford them. Rich merchant families displayed their clocks proudly, like their European counterparts had showed off pineapples. Women’s jackets started to be decorated with ‘clock buttons’ made of enamel and one family embroidered a clock face on to their baby’s silk bib. European aesthetics made their way into other parts of Chinese society too. Traditional ink portraits became colourful and hyper-realistic, inspired by photography. Courtesans learned to play billiards

The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the truth. Rego has said that she hopes and expects that when people look at her pictures, ‘Things will come out that I’m not even aware of.’ And that’s right too: every marvellous picture tells so many stories, and is so charged with under- and overtones, that no one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on. That’s certainly true of many works in the Rego retrospective at Tate Britain. All notable painters and sculptors are, of course, sui generis. They don’t follow established rules; instead they make

A few years ago, the American artist Barbara Kruger covered the façade of Frankfurt’s Kaufhof department store with a pair of huge eyes. It was as if Big Brother had come out of retirement. Above that unsparing gaze was the slogan, in Kruger’s signature Futura bold italic font: ‘You want it. You buy it. You forget it.’ It was a typical work of art by Kruger. She made her career from what’s called culture jamming, subverting media messages by transforming them into their own anti-messages and by indicting the business of capitalism. In 1987, for instance, she took an advertising image of an all-American boy flexing his juvenile biceps before

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1901, delighted in paper games. Maps unfurl, book leaves fly, cut-outs and cartouches abound. His designs are a miscellany of silhouettes, decoupage, concertinas, peek-a-boos, lift-the-flaps and grubby thumbprints. Edges are ragged, endpapers torn. On the dust jacket to Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), a military map has been

Coronavirus has cast a dampener over this year’s Mayflower 400 celebrations due to a hidden enemy with which the Pilgrim Fathers were all too familiar: within months of their arrival in America more than half of them had died of a disease whose principal symptom was violent coughing. There was no official artist on the Mayflower. Its ragtag party of Separatist Puritans had only been granted a charter on condition that their religious affiliation, banned in England, was not formally recognised. So we can only imagine how the New World looked to the cabin-feverish colonists who made landfall at Plymouth in December 1620, lustily shaking ‘the desert’s gloom/With their hymns

There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University College London’s cleverly curated exhibition, Witnessing Terror: French Revolutionary Prints 1792–94. Visitors were invited to contribute their own lines of stitches before picking up a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, in which Dickens fictionalised the tricoteuses, the women who gathered around the guillotine knitting and waiting for heads to roll. The first six prints are French portraits of ‘revolutionary martyrs’ ranging from Louis XVI, wearing the bonnet rouge, or red cap of liberty, that was placed on his head when the crowd broke into the Tuileries Palace in