Miguel Cullen, Author at Catholic Herald

Miguel Cullen

Film: A tear-jerking road movie for the age of austerity

March 16, 2017

Icíar Bollaín and Paul Laverty, a tight-knit duo with close links to Ken Loach, respectively direct and write the screenplay of The Olive Tree (★★★★, cert 15, 99 mins) – a tear-impelling study of the bonds forged between grandfather and granddaughter. At once a look at the Iberian economic crisis and the quick-fix loans that

Fine Art: Refugee horrors captured by a lab-cold lens

March 09, 2017

The Maltese ship that decorated the Nativity scene in St Peter’s Square this past Christmas memorialised the plight of the refugee, a haunting echo of the wars in Africa and the Middle East. Now Richard Mosse, too, is recalling to our minds a conflict that has been made banal by the ugly atonality of the

Fashion giants are making Italy sparkle again

March 01, 2017

Big firms are restoring the nation’s glories in return for publicity

Fashion giants are making Italy sparkle again

February 16, 2017

Why does Sheikh Mansour own Manchester City? Because it is a good business. It’s a prestige purchase that gives him exposure. You could say that the Roman Colosseum is a living, breathing thing, more than just a millennia-old monument. But in its own time, it was the Etihad Stadium par excellence. Diego della Valle, a

Fine art: How David Hockney escaped naturalism

February 16, 2017

David Hockney, or David Mockney, for the purposes of this article, is having a show at the Tate Britain. He’s got all he asked for – fame, artistic pre-eminence, glamour – how does someone live with all that? It must be a weight on the soul, as well as a blessing. To quickly catalogue his

Robert Rauschenberg: the artist whose echo resounds in countless galleries today

February 10, 2017

His masterpieces remind us what we have still yet to surpass

Fine art: The hi-tech artist who had no time for ‘taste’

February 09, 2017

To stay ahead of the pack, you’ve got to keep moving. Taste doesn’t matter to you, because taste is what people who watch care about. All you can say with certainty about Robert Rauschenberg is that he was avant-garde – he has had too many different ideas to be able to skewer him – and

Fine Art: Vanessa Bell through a granddaughter’s eyes

February 02, 2017

The textile artist, literary art director, muralist and fashion designer Cressida Bell – Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter and Virginia Woolf’s great-niece – invites me into her studio in Hackney Central. I am greeted by a wash of colour: geometric dots, kimono-hued patterns, a ménagerie of lampshades, assistants, an Indian bust by her ceramicist and art historian

Fine Art: In Picasso’s traumatic portraits, we see ourselves

December 22, 2016

When writing a round-up of exhibitions in London in 2016, certain conflicts emerge. It’s easier to bring together than my esteemed colleague Will Gore’s film round-up, as seeing an exhibition can take minutes, while a film takes up a minimum of an hour. If you’re going to look at it like that, and a glance

Art preview: Van Gogh meets David Bowie at White Cube

November 17, 2016

Anselm Kiefer can be seen to resemble David Bowie, in the way that he in some way uses the deeds of the hard Right (in Kiefer’s case Nazism) to create shimmering, juddering images of great depth and vision. His greatest beauties are the tender pinks and dawn colours that he dabs his industrial white-grey pictures

Fine Art: Into the blue with a genius of the modern portrait

October 13, 2016

Picasso Portraits National Portrait Gallery, until February 5 The last portrait Picasso made was of himself, about to die. He had previously been the secret agent of art – with enough identities in his briefcase to roam all territories available to him. He would hide behind a moustache and sketch himself as Stalin for the

Art round-up: Punk in its heyday: which side were you on?

September 01, 2016

There is an exhibit in Punk 1976-78 which made me break out in (nostalgic) smiles. It is a T-shirt called You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know Which Side of the Bed You’ve Been Lying On, made by Malcolm McLaren. On one side it lists names of enemies of the punk state: Peregrine Worsthorne,

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