Culture

The Royal Collection Trust has had a rummage in the attic and produced a fascinating show. Displayed in the palatial gallery adjacent to Buckingham Palace, and described on headsets in the reassuring tones of Hugh Bonneville, are public tokens and personal treasures of two generations: Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and George V and Queen

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.)

A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum

Why is Hiroshige’s work so delightful? While his close predecessor Hokusai has more drama in his draughtsmanship, Hiroshige’s pastoral visions conjure a sense of timeless continuity that appealed to his contemporaries as much as to present-day teens who love the merch. His is a world in which everything has happened before, and will happen again.

In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in their twenties, the Irish artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They explained that they wanted him to teach them his method of ‘extreme cubism’. He wasn’t sure that he had a method, nor whether it

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure

Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to George Dance the Younger and at 18 had moved on to Henry Holland. Later came major commissions, a professorship, a knighthood and gold medals. Fame followed. Along the way he added an ‘e’ to his

In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you can simply buy a customisable 3D avatar from Turbosquid.com, animate it with your own movements by wearing a sensor-filled motion-capture bodysuit, and presto! Lifelike but eerily soulless, Ed Atkins’s video portraits occupy a strange visual

You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he sighs at his standing desk at the top of his house on Guernsey, where he held France constantly in view as he worked. Here, frustrated by Les Misères (working title), he has thrown down his

Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose wonderful university museum has its classical façade covered in sententious phrases in neon, and which has recently opened a new exhibition in agit-prop style: Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Such activism is fully in step

Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure of merit. Martin Gayford: ‘No one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on.’ Laura Cumming at least gave examples. Of ‘The Cadet and his Sister’ (1988), she commented: ‘Bondage – physical,

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the

Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible,

On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt,

When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief in fairies was at its height in Britain. Just over two years previously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in the 1920 Christmas issue of the Strand Magazine, had stated that the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ (tiny winged

Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among them is a copper flagon made in Syria and buried in Essex in the late 500s. It is believed that the flagon belonged to an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines against

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works. It’s not profound art but it’s

Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed

Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby some people do just that: they experience colour when they hear music, or taste words – think of the Revd Sydney Smith describing heaven as eating foie gras to

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with

Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. It is perhaps a source of regret for the group that the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan are missing in action. They were blown up in 2001 either, depending on who you ask, because of

There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough,

In 2022 the Wellcome Collection caused a stir by closing its Medicine Man exhibition on the grounds that it was ‘based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language’. Director Melanie Keen had previously talked of reinterpreting the collection but had now evidently decided it was beyond redemption. ‘We can’t change our past,’ she said

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up