Art

William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for translating a passage from Macbeth into Greek verse. Over the years he published numerous articles in scholarly journals on subjects ranging from astronomy to botany. One thing he could not do, however, was draw well — and it was this inadequacy that changed the world. While on holiday in Italy in 1832, he became so frustrated by his failure to draw Lake Como satisfactorily using a pencil and a drawing aid known as the camera lucida — his efforts were well below GCSE art standard — that he resolved to

A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know better. Did the world really need an operatic treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy for orchestra and chorus? Louis Andriessen thought so; his La Commedia (2004–8) luckily only reared its drab head for one night at the Barbican. If you’re going to splurge as much money as opera often has to splurge, you have to ask yourself why. If you don’t, you create a situation in which operas come about merely because they can, often just to continue the tradition in the most inoffensive way possible. ‘Don’t mind me!’ says this

Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings off, while she rests her blistered feet. She scoops a palm of water with cupped hands and tenderly washes those of her grandfather: her feckless, gambling, on-the-lam grandfather. It is an old Oscar Wilde chestnut, but one would have to have a heart of stone to look at William Holman Hunt’s portrait of Charles Dickens’s saintly ‘Little Nell and her Grandfather’ (1845) without laughing. Likewise Arthur Hughes’s ‘The Woodman’s Child’ (1860), a portrait of a tousle-haired country mite sleeping in the woods, attended by a squirrel and robin, their red

Last September a photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a beach near Bodrum made headlines around the world. The image had a significant effect on shifting public perception to the Syrian refugee crisis as well as sparking a debate around the ethics of the circulation of such images. Academics at the University of Sheffield have estimated that 53,000 tweets were sent per hour at the height of the image’s circulation reaching 20 million people around the world in 12 hours. Last week, over four months after the image appeared, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made his own contribution to the debate in a photograph which depicts

Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him of ‘a dressmaker, who having seen how pretty one frill looks, makes a dress bearing ninety-nine’. If you substitute paintings of flower-beds and dappled sunlight for chromatic keyboard runs, something similar is true of the new blockbuster at the Royal Academy, Painting the Modern Garden. That, however, is only half the verdict on this curious affair. It is a show that feels a bit overblown — like a visit to an enormous Victorian conservatory — but contained inside it is another, triumphantly successful exhibition that is inspiring, exalting and almost

Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously gave up painting in favour of something more conceptual — ready-mades and whatnot — whereas Craig-Martin began with Duchampian concepts. He once exhibited a glass of water on a shelf together with a claim that he had mentally transformed these, by a kind of transubstantiation, into an oak tree. Then he metamorphosed himself into a still-life painter. As his current exhibition at the Serpentine demonstrates, for nearly 40 years Craig-Martin’s staple subject-matter has been everyday tools, gadgets and accessories. An early example, ‘Vertigo’ (1981), consists of elegantly pared-down line drawings

This sign adorns a local church in Harlesden. I suppose it could be called a Pop Annunciation. Who says religious art is stuck in the past? Then again, it is a perennial – and fascinating – question in Christian art: how much contemporary life to include in biblical scenes. For centuries artists have shocked the public by including ordinary-looking young beauties as Mary, ordinary working blokes as shepherds or apostles. Caravaggio is a good example, but even before him nativity scenes were transposed to Tuscan landscapes. In fact the first realistic landscapes in Western art were posing as biblical backdrops. The shock was rehashed by the Pre-Rapahelites, whose sacred scenes featured

Within the first ten minutes of last night’s televised Turner Prize ceremony, someone had twice declared that the award was a ‘concept’. I must say, this was news to me: I’d always believed it was an award for contemporary art that existed to create a buzz around young artists who otherwise couldn’t get arrested. More often than not, one of the nominees is chosen to manufacture a bit of controversy – hardly the most noble objective, but it can make for a good half hour of telly. Kim Gordon forgetting what year we were in aside, what we got instead was in no sense good TV, but then that’s not