Dead babies, zombie brides, sex workers, Osama bin Laden, Phil Spector without his wig; welcome to the world of Marlene Dumas. The subject matter Dumas chooses for her paintings certainly isn't for all tastes. "Crude" and "offensive" are among the ... The Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) used to be known as "the Prince of Painters and the Painter of Princes." In a century overloaded with artistic talent, Rubens reigned supreme. But whereas the reputations of his contemporaries, including Caravaggio, ... When the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," begins, the narrator, Dr. John H. Watson, is kicking his heels in London, having recently been invalided out of the army. Watson isn't very complimentary about the capital, calling it ... His hand rests affectionately on her bosom; she acknowledges his gesture with a gentle caress. Although it's called "The Jewish Bride," we don't know whether the painting depicts a contemporary couple or a historic union, perhaps Isaac and Rebecca. No ... Typical. You wait ages for an exhibition to do with a major post-1945 German artist, then two arrive at once. Hot on the heels of the new Anselm Kiefer show at the Royal Academy (previously reviewed on this site) comes ... My favorite anecdote about the painter John Constable (1776-1837) concerns the hare that can be seen running across the foreground of his large watercolor "Stonehenge" (1835), one of the highlights of this new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. ... Ultramarine is a blue pigment derived from a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli. During the Renaissance period, lapis lazuli was more highly prized than gold, and with good reason: its only source was in the remote province of Badhakhshan in northeast ... There's something deeply reassuring about a show that has been held every year, without interruption, since 1769. Wars and revolutions may come and go — indeed, entire civilizations may rise and fall — but the annual Royal Academy of Arts ... "Building the Picture" is about the bit of an Italian Renaissance painting that often seems to be jostling with the figures for pictorial space: the architectural background. In fact, as curators Amanda Lillie and Caroline Campbell convincingly demonstrate, buildings played ... Old age is no respecter of genius. True, there have been some artists — Goya, for example, or Monet — who managed one final great surge of creativity, but the sad fact is that far more end up plagiarizing themselves, ...
