DOCUMENTA It attracts  serious attention in contemporary art circles but there isn’t an awful lot of love for it. Documenta, the legendary mega-exhibition, happens  every five years in the sad, small German town of Kassel. The show has always been intellectual and...
If there is one unmissable modern art exhibition this summer it has to be Portraits by Cézanne (1839-1906) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GWacaEf4I0 In 60 paintings it proves many things, first of all the museum’s pulling...
Overlooked during her lifetime, Carol Rama is enjoying a spectacular success two years after she died at the age of 97. Currently the Palazzo Ca’Nova in Venice and the New Museum in New York are both showing the artist’s work. Hailing from Turin, Carol Rama produced a...
The tragedy of great artists is their far-sightedness means they’re often misunderstood. Take the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the very big names in world photography, someone who in the 1930s was throwing himself into a new genre we refer to...
Magisterial, beautiful and comprehensively documented. ' Primitive Picasso'  at the Musée du Quai Branly is pieced together like a police investigation and questions commonly held assumptions about the greatest painter of the 20th century,Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Or...
 The brilliance of certain artists lies in their ability to force you to really look at what they have to show. It’s true of German-born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Slowly but surely he’s become one of the superstars of contemporary art, and...
In the '90s HBO aired ‘Dream On’, a US series where the lead character at key moments had flashbacks of clips from TV shows he’d watched in his childhood. It was a way of saying that all adults born since the '60s are TV babies, shaped by its images, its theme tunes,...
‘The Thinker’, ‘The Kiss’... Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is a giant of sculpture whose most famous works have almost become clichés (on this idea of Rodin as a cliché, see  the new work by Urs Fischer – a life-sized version of 'The Kiss' in Plasticine, as...
New York’s most stunning exhibition right now is dedicated to a complete unknown – or near enough. His name is Hercules Segers (circa 1589-1638), he’s a Dutchman and he was best known for his prints. Don't be put off by the austerity of the subject matter. Segers is...
Who among us hasn’t felt at least once, while walking by the sea, through a forest, or in the mountains, a kind of mystical impression, a communion with the sky and the earth, a sensation of being drawn towards the sublime absolute. To relive that experience, but...
When François Mitterrand discovered he had prostate cancer and opted not to make the information public, this powerful politician who had a remarkable talent for manipulating other people suddenly had nothing to lose. When the economist and the ex-IMF chief Dominique...
In Paris, a stone’s throw from the Boulevard Saint Germain, an exceptional new show has just opened that looks into the creative process behind Dutch masterpieces of 17th century. It involved a police-like investigation of history to locate the drawings that helped to...