“Massive features, hoarse voices, flaccid bosoms, and painted eyes, and all, like so many automata wound up at the same time with the same key.” Thus does Des Esseintes, the neuralgic aesthete-protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ decadent 1884 clas...

It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer mammoth intensity of New York City’s art scene. Museum behemoths like the Metropolitan, the Frick, and MoMa – invariably expansive, often labyrinthine – dominate the average tourist’s itinerary. But tuc...

I am allowed to enter. This, apparently, is the great benefit conferred upon me after my editor's hours on the telephone with variously obstreperous members of staff, few of whom have been particularly inclined to forestall hanging up the phone. A...

For the ill-starred heroes of Greek tragedy, the life of the individual was a study in alienation: the self, whether Oedipus or Antigone, forever caught in the meaningless machinations of quibbling deities or subdued by the incomprehensible decrees of Fate. So too for one of Georgia's greatest modernists, Petre Otskheli (1907-37), the theatrical wunderkind whose creative partnership with Kote Marjanishvili, director of the avant-garde Marjanishvili Theatre, was cut short by the terrors of Stalin’s Great Purges. Otskheli’s phantasmagoric collection of stage sets and costume designs, currently on display through September 7 at Tbilisi's National Gallery, suggest an equally grim picture of the plight of man. Trapped in increasingly geometric worlds of sharp angles and collapsing shapes, dwarfed by swaths of fabric that grotesque distort the body's silhouette, Otshkheli's characters, from the battered Othello to the imperious Beatrice Cenci, contend with a surreal landscape that is at once profoundly Classical and, in its nods to Art Deco and expressionism, thoroughly twentieth-century.

There is always something a bit disconcerting, about being a woman in an art exhibition: particularly an exhibition of an artist like Pablo Picasso, whose ability to atomize, reduce, and re-arrange the female body has rendered him one of modernity...

Much has been made, in recent decades, of Picasso's perceived misogyny. His grotesque abstractions of the female body – the tragic implosion of his 1937 Femme en Pleurs, for example, which treads the boundary line between distortion and revelation – have all too often been read as evidence of an easy dichotomy: the relationship between the powerful, disengaged, and often disembodied (male) artist and the objectified female flesh he kneads like dough until it resembles the creations of his own consciousness. But in the British Museum's revelatory new display of Picasso's Vollard Suite, a series of one hundred etchings commissioned by avant-garde art dealer Ambroise Vollard between 1930 and 1936, we find a far more multifaceted examination of the politics of gender and creation than many of Picasso's critics would allege.