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Few collections anywhere (perhaps only the Turners at the Tate, London) can rival the drawings and watercolours of Albrecht Dürer housed in Vienna’s Albertina. To see the bulk of them abroad together seems nothing short of a miracle, like th...

Towards the end of 1777 [Giovanni Battista] Piranesi made an arduous expedition to the remote malarial marshes in the Bay of Salerno …to record three majestic Greek Doric temples at Paestum. This extract from John Wilton-Ely’s boo...

Gently turning, changing in unpredictable directions, trembling in invisible air currents; the dance of light against a wall rebounding from unpainted elements; Alexander Calder’s post-war works are distinguished not only by the grace and balance ...

‘Familar and yet strange’ is how Bill Brandt (1904–83) referred to his work in the introduction to his book Camera in London , published in 1948. Bill Brandt was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg in 1904. In reference books he ...

Walk onto London’s Victoria Underground station and be confronted by two gigantic prizefighters, the central motif of George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s. The Royal Academy’s advertising of the first ever exhibition of Bellows&r...

Dieter Roth used his own name as an experimental artist’s medium. At different times he went under the aliases of dieter roth, DITERROT, diter rot, and Dietrich Roth. He was born Karl-Dietrich Roth in 1930 in Germany to a Swiss father: this allowe...

Tired of the milling crowd and sharp elbows at the RA’s Manet show? Then I can make a suggestion to bring your blood pressure down. One stop on the tube and a walk across Trafalgar Square to the National Gallery and the Frederic Church exhibitio...

The American Civil War was first modern war. It was also the first to be recorded in a comprehensive photographic record, as well as in traditional artistic means, and painters and draughtsmen were aware from the start that they had a visual rival. It p...

‘Postcard Narratives: Jeremy Cooper and invited artists’, has opened at ROOM Artspace, London (until 27 April, 2013). Art works were created from Cooper's comprehensive collection of artists’ postcards, that is, postcards as artist...

The work of the 19th-century artist, George Catlin (1796–1872) is little known in Britain. Yet he is the artist who has displayed the most paintings in the Louvre, a record unlikely ever to be broken! The display at the National Portrait Gallery i...

A short sentence, ‘ Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman ’, from the 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), was a starting poin...

You may never have heard of the architect Henri Labrouste (French, 1801–75), I certainly hadn't, but his influence on 19th- and 20th-century architects and the way civic space, and that of libraries in particular, is conceived has been enormou...

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82) is enjoying a sudden vogue in London. Two important galleries north and south of the Thames are featuring the Spaniard’s paintings from their respective collections until 12 and 19 May respectively,...

This nicely illustrated, informative, and inexpensive small companion volume will prove a useful companion to the Mansion House (London) installation of the celebrated Harold Samuel collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish pictures. A truly scholarl...

Marcel Duchamp would probably have a wry smile of indifference on his face with the numerous readings of his life and work to be found here in relation to John Cage, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps it is this attitude tha...

Surprisingly, there has never been a UK major retrospective of portraits by the French painter Édouard Manet (1832–83). That omission has been rectified by the Royal Academy of Arts in its exhibition ‘Manet: Portraying Life’ (on...

One year in Picasso’s life, at the turn of the 20th century, saw him make his first artistic breakthrough. It is that year, 1901, that the current exhibition puts under scrutiny. A small exhibition containing only 18 paintings, it tells the story ...