Culture

It’s payback time: women, artists from ethnic minorities and non-western traditions are taking over the exhibition schedules. On the heels of the seven women expressionists in Making Modernism at the Royal Academy comes Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South. ‘We are aware that art history has excluded a lot

Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but I do not like to talk about them,’ she’d say. ‘I am not a thinker, I am not an art historian, I just do.’ It was her profession, she would maintain. Rie’s work is astonishingly

In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for the three windows in a lower room, at the Queen’s building next to the park (where the Dutch painters work’). Willem van de Velde and his son, also called Willem, would have preferred a studio

You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before

If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery

Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3, covered in red dots. It’s centred on the Finchley Road north of Swiss Cottage, and every dot (there are nearly 50) represents a business or an institution associated, in the middle years of the last

‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard to disagree. But the full range of his work is hard to see, spread out as it is on altars and tombs through Florence and elsewhere in Italy. This makes Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at

In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when the War Office commissioned Frank Newbould in 1942 to design a poster with the patriotic slogan ‘Your BRITAIN – fight for it now’, it featured Sussex, with a shepherd herding sheep in the foreground and

‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish gypsies in the port city. The family of American railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington had just docked at the start of an 1882 European tour that would introduce Archer to the National Gallery and the

‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’

There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of human pleasure; crocks and bottles are usually just vehicles for displays of technical virtuosity. Crocks and bottles are what Giorgio Morandi painted, not because he wanted to show off but because he liked their lack

Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of the corner of his mouth. The two men, busy bundling sticks in a wood, look around apprehensively while a third man up a ladder attacks a tree with a billhook. The three of them are

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards

 The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show. Excluded from official art schools and reliant on

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across

Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s new Cezanne blockbuster have begun by dropping the acute accent from his surname, apparently a Parisian affectation not in use on the artist’s home turf. Anticipating grumbles about another major exhibition devoted to a dead

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary

William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it, from my first delighted sight of one of his charcoal-drawn animations, ‘Monument’ (1990), in the Whitechapel’s 2004 exhibition Faces in the Crowd to my awestruck confrontation with his eight-channel video installation I am not me,

Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with an inflatable ball with her young daughter in the early 1960s that Maria Bartuszova had the idea of filling balloons with liquid plaster instead of air. The inspiration fed her muse for 30 years, seeding

‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The latter – olive – vine – flowers… warmth & light, better health – greater novelty – & less expense in life. On the other side are, in England, cold, damp & dullness, – constant hurry

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins, where she was greeted with a wide-eyed grin. ‘This is wonderful – the first Allied soldier I’ve seen, and it’s you!’ the artist exclaimed, reaching up to place his hand affectionately around her

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he is too uncontroversial, his appeal too broad, his approach altogether too winsome. None of that stopped the team behind Philip Guston Now – a travelling mega-survey of his work, which will reach Tate Modern in

‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the moment you push open the Hayward’s heavy swing doors you see what he means. Outside, a world of grey utilitarian concrete; inside, a vibrant crew of invaders from planet Zog glittering like Technicolor Pearly Kings

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist?

Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to the general public. But with Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery is on to a winner, as not only is the particular picture a showstopper, but the theme opens up a whole

Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents sent her a silver spoon or fork every birthday. She seems to have had a thing about silverware ever since. She used to sell it on Portobello Market, and it formed the basis of her