At first glance it seems a straightforward if animated photograph of Israeli soldiers in a mess hall: uniformed young men chatting, pouring, laughing, smoking at a set of utilitarian tables bearing metal bowls and nondescript food. But it doesn’t take long to sense that the scene is spiritually and sexually charged. The men are a [...]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York began collecting photography in the 1930s, but in the UK the Tate largely ignored the medium until 2003 when it presented Cruel and Tender, which looked at realism in photography. Next week sees the opening of Street & Studio, Tate Modern’s second major historical photographic show. Made [...]

Without horses, where would we be? Trousers might never have become fashionable. The violin might never have come into existence. The Aztecs might have thrived another few centuries. The Industrial Revolution might have sputtered out before its time. No one would have to get off his high horse, and no political race would have a [...]

A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties. “Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea [...]

The artist at his home and studio in Captiva Island, Fla. in 2005. Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82. Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in [...]

In June 1902, the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin was passing through Vienna, en route from Prague. While in town, he accepted an invitation to visit the current exhibition of the Vienna Secession movement, and to meet the artist whose monumental work, the Beethoven Frieze, was at the heart of the display: Gustav Klimt. The [...]

‘I bought my first erotic photograph in the mid-1980s,’ Danny Moynihan tells me. ‘I had come across some photos of Austrian origin of rather portly looking ladies in petticoats playing with sex toys. I thought they were rather amusing.’ Moynihan is an artist and a curator. He has collaborated frequently with his friend Damien Hirst [...]