menu_open
Laura Gascoigne

Laura Gascoigne

The Spectator

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become

The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions. A good place to start is to ask what...

previous day 6

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting

Laura Gascoigne has narrated this article for you to listen to. For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had...

wednesday 5

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting

Laura Gascoigne has narrated this article for you to listen to. For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had...

11.04.2024 6

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The compelling, ghostly charcoals of Frank Auerbach

‘In some curious way, the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected,’ Frank Auerbach said in 2012. ‘Otherwise,...

28.03.2024 5

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Why do movies always have to bash the ‘burbs?

Mothers’ Instinct is a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain and it is one of those over-ripe, camp melodramas that,...

28.03.2024 5

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Insipid show of a weak painter: Angelica Kauffman, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

Angelica Kauffman’s funeral in Rome in 1807 was designed by her friend Canova on the model of Raphael’s. The corpse of ‘the great Woman, the...

21.03.2024 7

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Exhibitions / The true inventor of the superhero comic? William Blake

Among the documents in the West Sussex Record Office is an indictment for sedition of a certain William Blake. During an altercation in a Felpham...

14.03.2024 6

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Dazzling but it’s all show: Tate Britain’s Sargent and Fashion reviewed

Madame Ramon Subercaseaux, the beautiful wife of a Chilean diplomat, was not a Parisienne. So when the 25-year-old John Singer Sargent’s portrait of...

29.02.2024 4

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Exhibitions / The genius of Yoko Ono

The first I heard of Yoko Ono was when my sister’s boyfriend brought home a little book of hers called Grapefruit. It was 1970, four years after...

22.02.2024 3

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Winning: When Forms Come Alive, at the Hayward, reviewed

In case you didn’t know, we live in a ‘post-minimalist’ age, sculpturally speaking. Not a maximalist age, though some of the works in the...

15.02.2024 5

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

I was dreading this show – how wrong could I be: Entangled Pasts, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

In the wake of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition Black Atlantic about its founder’s ties to the slave trade comes the Royal Academy’s...

08.02.2024 9

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Like swallowing a pack of Parma Violets: CUTE, at Somerset House, reviewed

It’s funny how badly some 1960s films have dated. Watch What’s New Pussycat? today and you feel faintly sick. Never mind the chorus line of...

01.02.2024 7

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Joyous chaos: Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, reviewed

‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The...

25.01.2024 10

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Modern, timeless, effortlessly avant-garde: Pasquarosa, at the Estorick Collection, reviewed

In February 1929, an exhibition by a young unknown female painter opened at the Arlington Gallery on Bond Street. This was not surprising in itself,...

18.01.2024 7

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The killer satire of James Gillray

‘I hope the day will never come when I shall neither be the subject of calumny or ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten’, is how...

11.01.2024 3

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The spare, graceful, revelatory sculptures of Kim Lim

In 1989, the sculptor Lorna Green circulated a questionnaire among 320 of her female peers about their experiences as women in a male-dominated field;...

04.01.2024 4

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Arts / A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of...

14.12.2023 4

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Masterclass of an exhibition: Impressionists on Paper, at the RA, reviewed

Viewers have different relationships with small pictures, or perhaps it’s the other way round: small pictures have different relationships with...

07.12.2023 4

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Raucous, expressive and laugh-out-loud funny: Nicole Eisenman, at the Whitechapel Gallery, reviewed

There’s a photograph in Nicole Eisenman’s Whitechapel exhibition of the 28-year-old artist, in 1993, sitting at her easel with a big bow in her...

16.11.2023 6

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Embarrassment of riches / South Asian Miniature Painting, at MK Gallery, reviewed

In 1633, British merchants travelling east were issued with a royal command from Charles I: ‘As the king has considered that there is a great deal...

12.11.2023 6

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

The importance of lesbianism to British modernism: / Double Weave, at Ditchling Museum, reviewed

The name of Ditchling used to be synonymous with Eric Gill, but since he was outed as an abuser of his own daughters the association has become an...

07.11.2023 2

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters

Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral...

19.10.2023 10

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Proof that Rubens really was a champion of the female sex: Rubens & Women, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed

‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these people… I think that if Her Highness...

12.10.2023 3

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Marina Abramovic’s show is only of interest to diehard fans

‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls posed this question on their feminist poster,...

05.10.2023 5

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

You don’t have to be ‘woke’ to be troubled by the Fitzwilliam Museum’s links to slavery

What happens when a museum outlives the worldview of its founder? For publicly funded museums with collections amassed during the Empire that no...

21.09.2023 7

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

Surreal, pacy and fun: Christian Marclay’s Doors, at White Cube, reviewed

Sliding doors may change your life, but there’s no mystery in their transparency. A hinged wooden door is another matter; you’re never quite sure...

14.09.2023 8

The Spectator

Laura Gascoigne

36e8e22998d02585768abfbce40033db