‘A life crammed with many separate talents’: Len Deighton remembers Ted Dicks
Tucked away behind the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is a row of hidden studios. During the second world war they were used by the Special Operations Executive to train agents who were about to be dropped into German-occupied Europe. Late...
Dorothea Tanning obituary
Painter, sculptor and poet with a vivid, dreamlike styleThe American artist Dorothea Tanning, who has died aged 101, was a talented painter whose reputation was confounded by her long marriage to the great surrealist Max Ernst. He figures prominently i...
David Shrigley: one of the cleverest, funniest conceptual artists
Cartoon or work of art? From his stuffed animals to slogan teatowels, Shrigley's work is simple but profoundIt's the image everyone knows best – so well known that we're not even going to use it as an illustration here: a Jack Russell, stuffed, stand...
Ian Simpson obituary
Painter and educator who democratised and demystified the world of art"Anyone can learn to draw, just as anyone can learn to speak or write. Drawing is a perfectly ordinary way of communicating information." These words, from Drawing: Seeing and Observ...
Unstill lives: Tate Britain’s Migrations exhibition
A new show at London's Tate Britain raises profound questions about the fluidity of art – and who we areWhere does art start? People were at it on pots long before they carried pigments into their caves at Lascaux. Migrations, a startlingly original ...
Peter de Francia obituary
Artist with a brilliant and combative style, he became the RCA's professor of paintingIn 1959 Peter de Francia painted The Bombing of Sakiet, a canvas roughly 6ft high by 12ft wide, that has frequently been referred to as his Guernica. It was his resp...
The Birds of America by John James Audubon – in pictures
On Friday, this masterpiece of ornithological illustration is up for auction – and it's predicted to be the most expensive book ever
From the archive, 18 January 1883: The ghost story which ‘inspired’ Charles Dickens
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 18 January 1883A few weeks ago we mentioned a ghost story that had attracted the special attention and interest of Charles Dickens. This was the narrative of Mr. Thomas Heaphey, the artist, who stated ...
Francesco Vezzoli plans 24-hour museum to vainglorious decadence
Italian artist has charmed Helen Mirren into a toga for art that is sublime and sometimes debauched celebration of celebrityIf there is one art Francesco Vezzoli excels at, it is persuasion. The Italian video and conceptual artist has the knack of gett...
David Hockney: a life in art
'The iPad is like an endless piece of paper that perfectly fitted the feeling I had that painting should be big'David Hockney is lounging on a sofa in the studio on the top floor of his beachside house. On the wall in front of him are 18 television scr...
