Wall Art Guide

The coffee corner has become its own small room in many homes: a machine, a grinder, a shelf of cups, and a wall above it that is usually empty. A...

Wassily Kandinsky is often called the father of abstract art, and his circles, lines and triangles are some of the most recognisable forms in modern design. On the wall, though,...

William Morris designed wallpaper and textiles, not pictures. Yet his patterns — thrushes stealing strawberries, honeysuckle climbing through willow, tulips in a tight repeat — have become some of the...

Street art was made to be seen by people who weren't looking for it — on a subway platform, a bridge, the side of a building. Bringing it indoors changes...

Some of the most copied images in modern interiors were made with scissors by a man in his seventies. Henri Matisse's paper cut-outs — blue nudes, coral fronds, stars and...

A drinks poster sets a room's mood faster than almost anything else on the wall. A spritz print says summer terrace; a champagne chart says celebration; an illustrated woman with...

For most of the twentieth century, the story of abstract art started with Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Then the paintings of a Swedish woman who had died in 1944 started...

A colour field painting has almost nothing in it: two or three soft-edged rectangles of colour floating on a ground of another colour. That is exactly why it works on...

A home office has two art walls with opposite requirements. One is the wall in front of you, which you look up at forty times a day and must not...

Scandinavian style is routinely described as minimalism with better wood, and that is the wrong way round. Minimalism is a reduction: take away until only one thing is left. Scandinavian...

The difficulty with a boys room is not the motif, it is the age span. A wall decorated for a four-year-old is embarrassing to a nine-year-old and unbearable to a...

Pop art took its subjects from the things nobody considered subjects: soup tins, comic panels, advertising, film stills, packaging. The argument was that mass production had already decided what images...