In art there are those mythical places believed to have changed the course of history. Until the nineteenth century, if you considered yourself a serious painter you were obliged to make an initiatory journey to Italy on the trail of the Renaissance and Ancient Rome....
It’s a textbook case. In New York two major museums are currently showing two different artists exploring more or less exactly the same subject: the saturation of images in society and the omnipresence of surveillance cameras, tying in to our worries about security....
It’s always something of a disappointment when visiting the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to see the size of the exhibition spaces. After all for exemple Getty owns one of the finest photography collections in the world. But in fact as Glenn Phillips, Head of Modern...
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a great artist, not just a great photographer. He will forever be etched in memory as someone who immortalised in black and white those perfectly formed, statuesque naked male bodies in highly constructed environments. The numerous...
Like some bizarre coincidence, you turn up at a museum, meet the exhibition’s co-curator, and as if by some power of mimicry, she could easily pass for one of the muses of the said artist. So it happened with Cécile Godefroy, co-curator of the major new show at the...
270 galleries, from antiques to contemporary art, land in the Dutch city for nine days It is by no means the most expensive work on show at the 2016 edition of Tefaf Maastricht but it’s one of the most affecting. The Parisian gallery Kevorkian, which specializes in...
While the art world is in thrall to the latest fashions of contemporary art and the market, and while museums are ever more influenced (perhaps too much) by their generous patrons who keep these public institutions alive, New York has witnessed the birth a small...
The Armory Show is an event that is eagerly awaited in New York. The longest-running fair in the world capital of contemporary art, bringing together 205 galleries, appointed its new director, the former art journalist Benjamin Genocchio, last December just as global...
There are those who claim that the art market is globalised but as the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler used to say in the '90s, ‘The Italians buy Italian, the Americans buy American and the Germans buy German.’ Arco, which opened on Thursday, provides an interesting...
There’s a strange microclimate in the land once ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. It’s where you’ll find the impressive tomb of those monarchs of the Middle Ages, but that’s only scratching the surface... Ever since 1977 this town synonymous with mustard has also been...
A stone’s throw from the ugly Montparnasse Tower, which casts its 56-storey shadow over this historic and charming neighbourhood, an extraordinary new art space has recently opened. Be warned, it’s a journey back into time. At 21 Avenue du Maine, on a paved...
In the Dutch city of Delft there are no paintings by Vermeer of Delft while in Den Bosch (S’- Hertogenbosch) you won’t find a single Hieronymus Bosch. The Netherlands’ loss is the rest of the world’s gain. Yet the city associated with this towering 15th century...