Having become famous as a conceptual artist, Damien Hirst has just opened his first painting exhibition. And it’s making his reputation look as pasty as one of his woefully executed skulls, writes Stephen Feneley.
Painting
Can a landscape painting beat a landscape photo?
Culture mulcher WH Chong tackles a hoary old argument, photography versus painting, with a hands-on approach: photographing then painting Queensland’s Carnarvon Gorge.
The artist who let women be women
To celebrate Degas’ 175th birthday, WH Chong remembers a painter who set about liberating the female figure and female nude from the calcified postures and boundaries of the classical ideal.
Art for beauty’s sake
We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness, demands Roger Scruton.
Is this Michelangelo’s first painting?
The painting ‘The Torment of Saint Anthony’, rumoured to be Michelangelo’s first ever painting, will go on display for the first time ever this June.
Van Gogh didn’t sever his ear, it was all Gaugin’s fault: historians
According to a new book the most famous ear in history was severed by a sword wielded by Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art.
Shock, horror: great artist was “rampant egotist”
JMW Turner is known for his pleasing landscape paintings, but he had a less watercolour, competitive side that a forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain will explore.
Making love to the Presidents of the USA
Justine Lai’s series of oil paintings depicts herself in flagrante delicto with each US president (painting them in order, her conquests end at Ulysses S. Grant so far). Not so safe for work, unless your job’s with the EROS foundation.
National Gallery of Australia snares the Possum
The National Gallery of Australia last night paid $2.4 million for Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s huge painting Warlugulong at a Sotheby’s auction in Melbourne, writes Geoff Maslen.
