Virginia Woolf: Thinking Back Through Our Mothers at the Tate
“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my…
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Abrasion and Collision: On History’s Steps with Robert Rauschenberg, at the Tate
Three quarters of a lifetime ago, in the early spring of 1964, I saw an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Who exactly was…
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Wifredo Lam: The Albissola Years
It was his spirit of collaboration and friendship that first brought my father to the Italian coastal town of Albissola, just west of Genoa….
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“Embarrassment is a Challenge”: The Queasy Vulnerability of Maria Lassnig
In 1972 a curious awards ceremony took place in the cramped Manhattan studio of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig. Tired of being ignored as an…
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“Out There in the Many Miles of Bad Lands”: Georgia O’Keeffe in Her Own Words
“It takes a kind of nerve … and a lot of hard, hard work.” So said Georgia O’Keeffe at the age of 90 when…
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You Are Still Here: The Present Tense and Present Threat of Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum’s Grater Divide (2002) is a cheese-grater nearly seven feet high. On the one hand, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. On the other, it’s lethal. It…
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Eeriness: Tracing an Unquiet Tradition in British Landscape Art
In 1971 Derek Jarman made a 10-minute film called Journey To Avebury, documenting a summer walk through the chalklands of southern England. At first…
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Hold Still: A History of Performing for the Camera from Nadar to the Selfie
The most famous performance photograph of all time must be the one known as Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void), showing the…
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The Art of Protest
The relationship between art and protest has never been a stable one. It’s also a relation that perhaps suffers from being posed in the…
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Private View: Luc Tuymans on Henry Raeburn
I first saw Henry Raeburn’s work when I was 16 years old at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. It was a portrait…
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