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Drawing its title from a phrase in the Koran praising God’s creation, this book collects the papers from a conference on the use of colour in Islamic art and architecture. Though the subject is vast and the coverage erratic, the collection is beg...

John Stezaker’s work since the 1970s examines relationships to and between photographic images: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, a...

Keith Vaughan had no artistic training, and yet his work is instantly recognizable, ‘signed all over’ in the dealers’ parlance of the 1970s, clearly of its time, and still just as distinctive. Vann and Hastings do an excellent job, sec...

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have seen a shift in what is understood by ‘curating’. As Paul O’Neill puts it in the introduction to his very good book, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s...

'What we call painting was invented by the Venetians' (Cézanne) 'Here is true painting' (Rubens) Venice, a work of art in its own right, shimmering between sky and water, laid the foundation for the expansion of ...

After the ‘diversion’ of the Venetian Figures and Landscapes (1898–1913), Volume VI) , volume VII follows directly on from volume V, which covered figures and landscapes painted between 1883 and 1899. Still officially a portrait pa...

John Craxton was one of the English painters who grew up during the Second World War. He inherited the usual twin problems of young painters in our time, namely, what is to be said and how is one to say it? The continuous crashing of successive revoluti...

Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst focuses on the macabre and sinister subjects in visionary art dating from roughly 1790 to 1945. It includes a stellar cast of artists from the last two centuries: Géricault, Delacroix, Friedrich, Munch, ...

This lavish, three-volume gift box is only for specialists, but it is a milestone of patient, persistent visual research. Under the sponsorship of the Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, two scholars have devoted themselves to investigating ...

In 17th-century Flemish painting, Rubens remains the giant, and his unmatched knowledge of classical imagery and subjects, based on humanist training and nearly a decade in Italy (1600–8). But as Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) built upon the Ru...

There are many volcanoes in the world – we have heard a great deal this year about ash clouds from Iceland – but Vesuvius is still the most famous volcano of them. In AD 79 it destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum within hours. It has continued ...