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Sarah Kent |

Hidden among rampant foliage, a couple makes out with an urgency transmitted through Cecily Brown’s vigorous brush marks (pictured below right: Couple 2003-4). Their passion seems to have infected the whole woodland scene. The magenta flowers in the foreground are clearly defined, but as one’s eye travels back through the undergrowth, it’s as if feeling takes over from observation.

Sarah Kent
“Welcome” reads a sign hidden behind a metal screen whose spider-web of bars is designed to keep out unwelcome visitors (pictured below: Welcome:…
Sarah Kent
My walk through Hyde Park was an absolute joy. Spring is in the air, the weeping willow is in leaf (pictured below right: photo by S.K), the narcissi…
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There…

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Mark Sheerin
Three artists explore global concerns in rural West Sussex
Sarah Kent
The rise and rise of an artist
Sarah Kent
It pays to delay; how to be a great painter at 91
Sarah Kent
A painter’s journey in the wrong direction
Sarah Kent
Seascapes in which everything is stilled into a sense of harmony
Sarah Kent
Five of the best of the year's shows
Sarah Kent
Photography used to question who and what is worth recording
Sarah Kent
Light as a physical presence
Bill Knight
At last, a UK festival that takes photography seriously
Sarah Kent
The couple's coloured photomontages shout louder than ever, causing sensory overload
Sarah Kent
Fashion photographer, artist or war reporter; will the real Lee Miller please step forward?
Sarah Kent
Room after room of glorious paintings
Mark Sheerin
Locally rooted festival brings home many but not all global concerns
Mark Kidel
Remembering an artist with a gift for the transcendent
Sarah Kent
Pictures that are an affirmation of belonging
Sarah Kent
Small scale intensity meets large scale melodrama
Sarah Kent
A brilliant painter in search of a worthwhile subject
Sarah Kent
Testing the boundaries of good taste, and winning
Sarah Kent
Social satire with a nasty bite
Sarah Kent
Emanations from the unconscious
Sarah Kent
Mouths have never looked so good
Sarah Kent
How to make millions out of kitsch

Footnote: A brief history of british art

The National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection - Britain's art galleries and museums are world-renowned, not only for the finest of British visual arts but core collections of antiquities and artworks from great world civilisations.

Holbein_Ambasssadors_1533The glory of British medieval art lay first in her magnificent cathedrals and manuscripts, but kings, aristocrats, scientists and explorers became the vital forces in British art, commissioning Holbein or Gainsborough portraits, founding museums of science or photography, or building palatial country mansions where architecture, craft and art united in a luxuriously cultured way of life (pictured, Holbein's The Ambassadors, 1533 © National Gallery). A rich physician Sir Hans Sloane launched the British Museum with his collection in 1753, and private collections were the basis in the 19th century for the National Gallery, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the original Tate gallery and the Wallace Collections.

British art tendencies have long passionately divided between romantic abstraction and a deep-rooted love of narrative and reality. While 19th-century movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian Gothic architects paid homage to decorative medieval traditions, individualists such as George Stubbs, William Hogarth, John Constable, J M W Turner and William Blake were radicals in their time.

In the 20th century sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers embody the contrasts between fantasy and observation. More recently another key patron, Charles Saatchi, championed the sensational Britart conceptual art explosion, typified by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Arts Desk reviews all the major exhibitions of art and photography as well as interviewing leading creative figures in depth about their careers and working practices. Our writers include Fisun Guner, Judith Flanders, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Sue Steward and Josh Spero.

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