Between late 2003 and mid 2005, London art critic Martin Gayford had the old-fashioned privilege of sitting for two portraits - one on canvas, the other an etching - by Lucian Freud, possibly the most ...

The painter David Hockney and the critic Martin Gayford have been friends for 25 years. Their friendship, Mr. Gayford writes, has largely been “conducted at a distance, by email, phone calls, an ...

Museums have long attracted rather woeful comparisons to mausoleums, tombs, and crime scenes, among other sites of death and decay. The French writer Paul Valéry once lamented that only in the museum ...

The reader is of course at a remove and in a sense, Gayford here is the curator, travelling a museum without walls. He stresses the essential necessity of encounters in real space and time – not at ...

Does art matter? It must do. To misquote someone else in an entirely different context: it hasn’t gone away you know, and painting is its oldest form. After being astonished at the age of the Lascaux ...

You could say that Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now by Martin Gayford and Antony Gormley, a book exploring the character, significance, and sheer longevity of the sculptural impulse ...

Vision, forbearance and the poshest speaking voice in the English language served Philippe de Montebello admirably during his 31-year tenure (1977-2008) as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

Lucian Freud at work, 2006 © David Dawson. An image from “Man With A Blue Scarf” by Martin Gayford. The artist Lucian Freud died Wednesday night in London at age ...

Restaurant Mural, 6th January 195: Victor Pasmore (1908 - 1998) at work in a restaurant on London's South Bank for the Festival of Britain. This recollection (via Frank Auerbach) of bloodyminded ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well ...