Visual Art

From the Chrysler to the Weston: 100 years of Art Deco

Florence Wolter explores the impact left by Art Deco on Oxford and European Culture. A century on, should we be looking forward, not back?

‘The Pink City’: Ten generations of Jaipur gems

Cherwell visited the Choudhary family's prestigious jewellery collection, now almost 300 years old.

Leonardo da Vinci and his devilish… boyfriend?

When we think of Leonardo da Vinci, the first things that come to mind...

The artist and the photographer: An analysis of Francis Goodman’s Film negatives

An unusual dynamic is consequently captured between the photographer and artist in the photograph of Lucian Freud.

The fractured mind, literature, and society.

“I felt the narrowing of my life to a very fine point. A hard triangle of a life over and me sprawled at its peak, hopeless and lost.” - Russell Brand, describing a mental breakdown.

Art in the Age of Technology

Imagine the future. You walk into a room expecting an art gallery. Instead, you come face to face with a baron white cubicle. A woman stands in the corner, holding a pair of VR glasses. She hands them to you. Puzzled, you put them on.

Flagrant Exhibitionism: The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition

Running since 1769, the Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open-submission art show. From film to photography and prints to paintings (and everything in between) the show brings together the world’s leading artists of all mediums, both household names and total unknowns.

Love, Lust and Angst

With ruthless contempt for form, clarity, elegance, wholeness, and realism, he paints with intuitive strength of talent the most subtle visions of the soul.” So Arne...

The Art of Money

How extravagance makes a statement

More than Pixels

The internet has changed the way we experience art

Dream Worlds

Marc Chagall's ethereal landscapes

“Vagina.” There, I said it.

Vulvar art and gendered fantasy

An Artist Censored and Shamed

In April 1912, aged 21, Egon Schiele found himself imprisoned for 24 days, having been accused of seducing and abducting underage girls and exhibiting...

Incorrect Impressions

Questioning the Impressionist movement and its origin

The Art of Our Times

Social movements and visual culture

The Rise and Fall of Artistic Movements

The mutability of movements is an inevitability. It’s the constantly self-renewing process within art that ensures it can continue to fulfil its purpose of...

Unstoppable and unassailable: Sean Scully is an artistic force of nature

Self-mythologising, commercially driven, and unabashedly 21st-century, Sean Scully drives his own narrative of artistic success with brazen solipsism.

Reflective Awakenings

  The Victorian period was one defined by immense social change - especially in regards to women’s position in society. Throughout the century, increasing debate...

Van Gogh and Britain

Exploring Van Gogh's fascination with British culture and Dickens

Tracey Emin’s A Fortnight of Tears: an unflinching study of the haunting power of trauma

The body is placed centre stage in an exhibition that flits between the violence of both birth and death.

Mackintosh at the Liverpool Walker

A working-class liberator of the arts

The crises of contemporary art

An exploration of beauty and meaning in the world of contemporary art.

Fantastic Cities: unveiling the complex realities, and fantasies, of urban life

A review of the Penny Woolcock exhibition at Modern Art Oxford

Recoiling from the shock: how Dadaism swallowed a post-war Europe

Dada expanded beyond its art, morphing as it did into a political rather than an aesthetic revolution.