Arts & Culture

Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...

Käthe Kollwitz aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ she once remarked. ‘But...

Last year I narrated Pelé’s My Autobiography – yes, I am the queer voice of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. This presented the challenge of voicing problematic and dated views, especially...

There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....

Again and again, Kauffman portrays herself holding a stylus and portfolio, the symbols not of painting but of drawing, of the intellectual and imaginative efforts that precede the messy work of the brush.

Another title for The Dead Don’t Hurt could be ‘Western Promises’, but this movie is a very late contribution to the genre. Only the worst promises are kept. The familiar nostalgia for loneliness...

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting....

In Surrealism’s first decade ‘transgression’ was the watchword: Breton advocated it, and Bataille both practised and theorised it. There was a residual bourgeois order with more or less clear lines...

When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is final, and that’s all we need to know, or can know?

Jan Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions.

Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...

Surrey comes from a different time. It is, to appropriate Surreyspeak, forever a wholly unconvincing approximation of yore (1450-1600). It comes from a different place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed,...

We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. But memory...

One way of refusing to see the difference between making a movie and talking about one is to remember that films often talk, literally and obliquely, about film. 

‘The artist,’ Jacques Lacan wrote, ‘always precedes [the analyst].’ Great works of art had already illuminated even the most deeply hidden features of the phenomena he sought to describe.

The idea of a church as a place for the dead as much as for the living has now largely disappeared, but it was central to religious thought and practice in the Renaissance and later. The living prayed...

Inuit art as we know it – though often assumed to be an ancient cultural tradition – is a product of the 20th century. Its imagery, however, is a complex fusion of old and new, of the pre-colonial...