Hettie Judah's books include Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood (Thames & Hudson) and The Secret Life of Stones (John Murray).
The Kenyan artist’s sculptures and installations acknowledge and stand up to the lavish interiors in equal measure
The idealised nude figure has an unshakeable place in art history, but artists have also turned their gaze to their own imperfect bodies
The artist modelled for Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and others, but her own sitters were afforded much more agency
The attacks on ‘degenerate’ art were brutal and shocking, but the bravery of the artists whose work was singled out should also be remembered
Women have often been thought susceptible to demonic influence, and creativity can be seen as a form of possession – notions reclaimed by artists in ingenious ways
The art world tends to favour self-promoting extroverts, but it is often the eccentrics and wallflowers who make the most interesting work
Figurative art is on the up and up but that doesn’t mean that every painting of a person is a literal depiction
A show of surgical paintings by Celia Hempton raises questions about how far the artist's eye can penetrate beneath the surface of things
Artists from Helen Frankenthaler to Marlene Dumas have poured and splattered paint on to their canvases with a sense of enviable abandon
From penitent saint to salacious sinner, the biblical figure has worn a number of different guises in art through the ages
