Culture

Why Diego Velázquez needed a lifetime to paint his enigmatic masterpiece

31 minutes

A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size

5 minutes

The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles

7 minutes

When luxury is good

The waste and exploitation of fast fashion shouldn’t blind us to the joys of making beautiful clothing with care

Roger Tredre

In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved

9 minutes

A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships

6 minutes

Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons

4 minutes

An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning

5 minutes

Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist

15 minutes

Sitting on the art

Given its intimacy with the body and deep play on form and function, furniture is a ripely ambiguous artform of its own

Emma Crichton Miller

The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation

3 minutes

‘If you’re creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ One artist’s imaginative activism

17 minutes

More than breathtaking, ‘The Birth of Venus’ signalled an aesthetic revolution

19 minutes

The spectacular Mardi Gras artworks born of a unique New Orleans tradition

16 minutes

The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage

30 minutes

The irreverent duo who thumbed their noses at the Soviet Union and the US art world

11 minutes

Why a forcefully phallic portrait of Henry VIII is a masterful work of propaganda

6 minutes

From spark of inspiration to final press – how William Blake built a book of poetry

8 minutes

Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form

14 minutes

Why European artists shifted their focus from power to peasants in the 16th century

5 minutes