Anyone in search of a dose of New Year pessimism should take a trip to London's East End. By the time I turn off Brick Lane and make my way down Cheshire Street, it is dark. Walking in the shadows past Yummy's Café and Tattoo Piercing, I notice a wall covered by graffiti demanding, in king-size capitals, that we "Feed The People And Burn The Rich!".

I hurry on past [...]

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was "the painter of the painters", declared Édouard Manet - but he was much more than that. The days when artists played a leading role in national or international politics are long gone (what does this say about the cliquey introspection of today's art world?), but while Velázquez's work is justly celebrated for its aesthetic achievements, far less well known is the role he [...]

By now, six years since the arrival of the new millennium, we might reasonably expect to feel challenged, invigorated and even unnerved by the advent of a fiery new spirit in art. But the zeitgeist of the present decade has yet to appear. Does anyone else share my sense of disappointment about the unfocused character of art today? Where are the young talents whose work is not just promising, but [...]

During the 1970s, restless young artists thrived on challenging the long-hallowed supremacy of painting. The heady avenues they opened up are still being explored today, but the allure of pigment, canvas and brush, suggests "Passion for Paint", the National Gallery's summer show, will never go away.

"Passion" is an apt name for this exploration of painting techniques across four centuries. Nothing could be more visceral than Rubens's panor amic tour [...]

Hailed today as a revolutionary pioneer of 20th-century painting, Wassily Kandinsky was oddly hesitant about becoming an artist. Until the age of 30, he pursued an academic career in law and economics at Moscow University. From 1896, however, the combined impact of Monet's hay-stack paintings and Wagner's Lohengrin forced him to change direction. He left his native Russia and began all over again, studying art in Munich and falling in [...]

As soon as you enter the Pompidou Centre's show "Los Angeles 1955-1985: the birth of an art capital", the mighty roar of the MGM lion assails your ears. But the noisy animal quickly begins to look lazy rather than macho. He is, after all, a pampered Hollywood celebrity, not a lord of the jungle. Indeed, after a while, the noise he emits in Jack Goldstein's looped film sounds more like [...]

Vincent Van Gogh's reasons for shooting himself in a lonely French field in 1890 have been endlessly debated, but a bitter sense of professional frustration must have played a part. Despite the efforts of his devoted brother Theo, a discerning art dealer, the painter sold just one work during his lifetime. It was only after his death at the age of 37 that prices for his pictures began to soar [...]

Towards the end of his long and restlessly energetic life, Michelangelo consigned an enormous number of his own drawings to the flames. The octogenarian artist must have decided that these images, never exhibited and mostly drawn in preparation for projects as ambitious as the Sistine Chapel, were simply not worth keeping. But the British Museum's unmissable show of his surviving drawings proves just how wrong-headed this bonfire was.

Michelangelo's graphic [...]

What is the most moving tribute ever paid by one artist to another? An outstanding contender must surely be Constable's awed remarks in 1826, after gazing excitedly at Jacob van Ruisdael's painting Thatched-Roofed House with a Water Mill. For the rest of that late November day, Constable could think of nothing else. "It haunts my mind and clings to my heart," he told his close friend Archdeacon Fisher, "and has [...]

Posing for a New York photographer in 1880, Winslow Homer looks the epitome of a dapper man about town. Sporting a trim boater, a well-cultivated moustache and an expensive three-piece suit, he seems ready to cut a dash in the most stylish Manhattan venues. But the 44-year-old painter shunned urban life in favour of wild, deserted locations. His growing professional success, along with membership of the Palette Club and other [...]