Goya neatly clothes himself in his own world of fantasy: He will have her in the end. In life, where the climate is much chillier, it was, alas, to be otherwise.
Royal Academy of Arts
A Dazzling and Troubling Display of Spanish Expansion
While acknowledging the horrors of colonialism, Spain and the Hispanic World also highlights the exchange of traditions and ideas.
What Constable Sacrificed for His Artistic Success
Sentimentality would creep into the artist’s late evocations of remembered childhood scenes, as would idealization.
The Melancholy Marriage of Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch
What do Emin and Munch have in common other than a burning desire to embrace, and be defined by, the miseries of life?
Léon Spilliaert’s Nocturnal Visions
Spilliaert saw his hometown of Ostend, Belgium, as a kind of liminal space between the outside and his interior world.
Lucian Freud’s Shadow Self
As a displaced refugee, Freud knew he would always be something of a stranger to himself, but how much would he ever wish to know of himself?
Antony Gormley Explores the Body as a Space Within a Space
This exhibition, Antony Gormley returns repeatedly to the motif of the artist’s own body to explore the significance of differences in scale and the negative space around an artwork.
The Hollow Heart of Antony Gormley’s Spectacle
Is there something self-aggrandizing about Gormley’s career-long obsession with making casts of his own body?
In a Perplexing Pairing, Michelangelo Overwhelms Bill Viola
While Michelangelo’s sketches are, like human existence, full of contradictions, Viola’s work relies primarily on empty spectacles.
Anti-Brexit Work by Banksy that Was Initially Rejected by Royal Academy Goes On View
The street artist originally submitted the work under the pseudonym “Bryan S Gaakman.”