Category: Art
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Elsa Schiaparelli: The Surrealist Couturière
In the history of twentieth-century fashion, few figures embody the dialogue between art and clothing as vividly as Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973). A Roman aristocrat turned Parisian visionary, she transformed couture into Surrealist theatre, collaborating with artists like Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray. To wear Schiaparelli was not simply to be dressed — it…
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Ernst Barlach: The Sculptor Who Carved the Soul
In an art world often obsessed with surface, Ernst Barlach stands apart as a sculptor of interiors — not of rooms, but of human beings. His figures are bent, weighty, contemplative; their silence is the first thing you notice. Then their gravity. Then, slowly, the emotional truth they carry. To encounter Barlach is not to…
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Güstrow: Ernst Barlach Territory
On the map, Güstrow looks like a gentle pause — a modest Mecklenburg town tucked between lakes and flat winter fields, an hour south of the Baltic coast. But anyone who walks its crooked lanes or slips into the cool hush of its churches discovers a place vibrating with an unexpected intensity. Güstrow is not…
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Martin Parr, photographer who transformed the everyday into cultural testimony, dies aged 73
Martin Parr, the British photographer whose saturated colours, wry humour and unflinching eye reshaped documentary photography, has died aged 73 at his home in Bristol on 6 December 2025. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, Parr’s interest in photography was encouraged early by his grandfather, himself a keen amateur. He studied at Manchester Polytechnic in…
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Proust & Bergotte
Marcel Proust on the Death of the Writer Bergotte The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting),…
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Tracey Emin: From Cool Britannia to Enduring Voice
Tracey Emin has always been more than the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists. Emerging in the 1990s as one of the central figures of Cool Britannia, she became a cultural lightning rod: provocative, confessional, uncompromising. Her work — from the notorious My Bed (1998) to her searing neon texts — has often been…
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Marina Abramović: The Body as Threshold, the Artist as Medium
It is Marina Abramović’s birthday today, so to celebrate we wrote a feature on her. Few contemporary artists have so thoroughly reshaped the very idea of performance as Marina Abramović. For five decades, she has pushed the limits of endurance, intimacy, vulnerability, and the porous border between artist and audience. Her work is at once…
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An Ode to Rosalía
There are artists who sing, and then there are artists who shift the air around them. Rosalía belongs firmly to the latter. She moves through sound the way a dancer moves through space—boldly, incandescently, with that exquisite balance of rigour and risk that marks a true original. To listen to her is to feel a…
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Udo Kier (1944–2025): A Tribute to Cinema’s Most Mesmeric Chameleon
Obituary of German actor Udo Kier (1944–2025), celebrating his singular career and five essential films, from Flesh for Frankenstein to Swan Song.
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Light in Color: The History of Stained Glass
For over a thousand years, stained glass has transformed light into story. From the vast rose windows of Gothic cathedrals to the jewel-like panels of Art Nouveau townhouses, it is a medium that is both art and architecture, both sacred and secular. Its history is a chronicle of craftsmanship, theology, and design — a history…
