Category: Art
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Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Geometry of the Instant Henri Cartier-Bresson invented a way of seeing so complete that it became the unconscious grammar of photography itself. Then, quietly, he put down the camera and went back to drawing. He had always said it was a sketchbook, not a vocation. He meant it. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris,…
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Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything
Saul Bass did not invent the film title sequence. He did something more consequential: he convinced Hollywood that the audience’s first minute and a half was not dead time to be tolerated but a work of art to be made. Everything that followed — in cinema, in corporate identity, in the visual culture of the…
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Everyone, All at Once Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted crowds, seasons, proverbs, and catastrophes. He was the first painter to look at ordinary people and decide that their lives were the whole subject. Five centuries later, no one has done it better. In the lower right corner of a painting completed around 1558, a pair…
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The 90s at Tate Britain: Art, Fashion and the Politics of Belonging
The 1990s have become unusually easy to recognise and increasingly difficult to remember in their complexity. Kate Moss, a slip dress, a warehouse party, a shark suspended in formaldehyde: the decade survives through images whose familiarity can conceal the circumstances that produced them. Tate Britain’s new exhibition, The 90s: Art and Fashion, brings this visual…
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Sorø Kunstmuseum: Sophie Dupont and the Art of Attention
At Sorø Kunstmuseum, an empty room painted by Anna Ancher, a Russian icon of mother and child, and an installation shaped by visitors’ breathing offer three very different encounters with human presence. Their proximity is part of the museum’s interest: a visit can move between domestic observation, religious devotion and the experiments of contemporary art…
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Frieze London 2026: What Deserves Our Attention
Frieze returns to Regent’s Park from 14–18 October. This year’s programme offers a rewarding route through contemporary painting, the politics of materials, domestic architecture and the changing interpretation of modern art. Every October, Frieze concentrates a substantial part of the international art world into a few days in London. Galleries arrive with new work and…
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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Asger Jorn
Encounters · No. 7 The Vandal with a Vision Asger Jorn bought other people’s paintings at flea markets and painted over them. He helped invent two of the twentieth century’s most radical movements and then walked away from both. He believed that art was not a product but a way of being alive. He was…
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Mick Rooney, 1944–2026: The Painter of the Human Theatre
The British painter and Royal Academician, whose mysterious, richly coloured pictures transformed ordinary human life into scenes of dream, myth and private theatre, has died. Mick Rooney, the British painter whose strange, densely imagined figurative pictures occupied a distinctive place in British art for more than half a century, has died. Born in 1944, Rooney…
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Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture
The German-born American artist, whose ecstatic suns, rainbows, cosmic figures and Day-Glo colours became part of the visual language of the 1960s, has died aged 88. Peter Max, the artist whose brilliant colours, cosmic landscapes and buoyant psychedelic imagery became almost inseparable from the visual culture of the American 1960s, died on 14 September 2026…
