Poet Laureate takes on the witches
Carol Ann Duffy commissioned to write for Lancashire's big year - a thoughtful celebration of eight women and two men who were hanged for witchcraft 400 years agoThe poor, persecuted Pendle witches are at last getting recognition in spades, with everyt...
Katie Paterson, the cosmicomical artist
At her shows you can hear the sound of a star dying. Brian Dillon on the surprising charms of her artJust how small an object, or intervention in the world, can an artist make before the idea of a "work" drifts away on the wind? A couple of years ago a...
Analysing Louise Bourgeois: art, therapy and Freud
Louise Bourgeois was in therapy for more than 30 years and wrote an essay on 'Freud's Toys'. The Freud museum in London has a display of her work and recently unearthed writings about her analysisAbove Freud's bulbous, oriental carpet-draped couch in 2...
Why I hate the myth of the suffering artist
It is absurd and insulting to assume artists are assisted by despair or hunger in a way that, say, plumbers are notSuffering. Now there's an artistic word. Or so you'd think.Let me first break off to apologise again for irregular filing. The long gap i...
John Griffiths obituary
Illustrator whose bold creations adorned Penguin book coversIn the 1950s there was a spectacular flowering of illustrative talent, much of which emanated from the Royal College of Art, in London. There, "commercial art" and "publicity design" were bein...
New faces on Sgt Pepper album cover for artist Peter Blake’s 80th birthday
Amy Winehouse, JK Rowling, Noel Gallagher, Mick Jagger and the Monty Python foot to feature in update of 1967 originalBritish pop artist Sir Peter Blake has taken inspiration from his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club...
Gillian Wearing; Patrick Keiller – review
Whitechapel Art Gallery; Tate Britain, LondonAt almost 50, Gillian Wearing is still making art to divide the audience. The curators of this show, for instance, appear moved by her little figurines of everyday heroes – a hoodie who turns out...
Prunella Clough and the art of ‘saying a small thing edgily’
The marvellously inventive painter believed art could be made out of the ordinary, and paid attention to aspects of urban and industrial life that are often overlookedThe best-known fact about the painter Prunella Clough is that she kept the price...
Route masters: William Blake’s Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims
Spring has sprung, and Jonathan Jones is choosing his favourite artworks that depict the new season. Today it's the turn of William Blake's famed engraving of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales crewJonathan Jones
Art nouveau – a magical style
It might not be fashionable, but the whiplash curves and dream-like women of art nouveau have never quite gone awayIn genteel hotels and the parlours of elderly aunts, there are ornaments with the unsung magical properties of an Aladdin's lamp. Apply a...
Damien Hirst and the great art market heist
Hirst is the world's richest artist and the Tate's big retrospective will mark the zenith of his power. But when his stock falls, how will an art world in thrall to big money respond?The Map and the Territory, the latest novel by the mordant French sat...
Anthony Caro: a life in sculpture
'I always pushed forward, and have had a career that would have been unimaginable even to myself back when I began'In 1955 the influential art critic David Sylvester identified Anthony Caro as the best British sculptor since Henry Moore. But by 1963 he...
