'You knitted me together … wonderful are your works' with Andrew Graham-Dixon

In this evening lecture, Andrew Graham-Dixon discusses textiles and drapery as analogues for the motions of the soul in some Old Master pictures.

Born in London in 1960, Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the English-speaking world. He has presented numerous landmark series on art for the BBC and other independents. He has a long history of public service in the field of the visual arts and served various committees and is currently a member of the board of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.

In the course of his career, Andrew has won numerous awards for writing and broadcasting, and his achievements have been acclaimed by many of his most distinguished peers.

In 1986, at the age of 25, Andrew Graham-Dixon was appointed Chief Art Critic of the Independent, a post in which he remained until 1998. Early in his career he won the Arts Journalist of the Year Award three years in a row.

Andrew was a contributing editor of Vogue (1986-2006) and Chief Art Correspondent for Talk magazine in New York (2003- 2005). He has contributed to The New Yorker, Apollo and numerous other publications.

Since 1999 he has been the Chief Art Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, writing reviews as well as the popular weekly column “In the Picture”. “In the Picture” ran for five years, between 2001 and 2006, and an anthology from it was published by Penguin Books in 2005 under the title In the Picture: The Year Through Art.

In 1991, Andrew began his long collaboration with the BBC, in the course of which he has written and presented more than a hundred long- and short-form documentaries about the visual arts. His first programme, The Billboard Project of 1992, brought such artists as Damien Hirst, Michael Landy and Rachel Whiteread to the attention of television audiences.

In collaboration with his great friend, the Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli, Andrew has made 5 series of films exploring the art and food of the many regions of Italy, entitled Italy Unpacked.

Among Andrew’s most recent projects was a (relatively) straight exercise in art history, a four-part study of Britain’s Royal Collection, entitled Art, Passion and Politics, and shown on the BBC in January 2018.

Andrew has written a number of books about art and artists. His earliest book, Howard Hodgkin, was the first monograph on one of the leading painters of today. It was followed by A History of British Art, Paper Museum, Renaissance, In the Picture, and Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, and Caravaggio: A Life Scared and Profane.

A similarly in-depth study - Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, was published in October 2025.

He also lectures all over the world to many different audiences and is an Ambassador for the Princes Teaching Institute.