What a sorry mess we are in. The other week, plans to celebrate the centenary of the Bauhaus’ arrival in Dessau were met with opposition. Proposing a motion called “The Aberration of Modernity” — which was rejected — in the …
In defence of showing Nazi art
Slightly bedraggled, a Royal British Legion poppy wreath hangs on the railings outside Museum Arnhem. In the pretty sculpture garden that overlooks the Rhine as it flows into the Netherlands from Germany stands a monument to the soldiers of the …
Coco Chanel’s inferiority complex
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel destroyed the restrictive, oppressive tenets of Victorian dress with a zeal that was personal. The “exterminating angel of nineteenth century style” released the Modern Woman, an individual designed in her own mould. It was her lifestyle, as …
The ideologues behind the RAAC crisis
At six o’clock in the morning of 16 May 1968, a 56-year-old cake decorator, Mrs Ivy Hodge, went to make a cup of tea in her 18th-floor tower block flat, Ronan Point, in East London. She filled the kettle, rested …
Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats
“You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.” That was the famous barb which the then-Prince Charles …
The afterlife of Freud’s muse
“One of the main reasons I want to speak to you now is because I’ve become increasingly aware of how both of us are regarded, in relation to men,” writes the artist Celia Paul to the late Welsh portrait painter …