Long passages of Barnett Newman: Here .are given over to its subject’s appetite for complaint. There are vexatious lawsuits brought on behalf of his wife, Annalee, and his own family (his father, Abraham, ran a gents’ clothing business). There are blistering letters to co-op boards on the unsatisfactoriness of shellacked floors, to Governor Nelson Rockefeller […]
It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. This familiarity, as Elizabeth Goldring notes at the outset of her superb and ground-breaking biography, means it is harder to appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared
Nearly sixty years ago, in June 1968, a beautiful image of a diver was discovered in a tomb of the early fifth century BC, excavated at Poseidonia (Paestum) in the part of southern Italy which the Greeks had colonised. Indeed, they were Greeks who had moved on, having already built one colony further south in […]
In 1933, the artist James Boswell produced a series of lithographs, each smaller than a postcard, entitled The Fall of London. In these prints, recognisable landmarks such as the British Museum become the settings for street warfare and revolution. The images are eerie – buildings loom against a night sky, thrown into shadow by the […]
A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene. That scene is everyday – and yet. Vermeer’s best …
‘I came into the world maladjusted – and I’m still that,’ admitted the Philadelphian chemist, entrepreneur and art collector Dr Albert Barnes (1872–1951) in a rare moment of self-awareness. His words go to the heart of his contrarian nature: a rags-to-riches businessman sensitive to the merest slight; a champion of democratic and progressive causes who was […]
John Rothenstein, then the Tate Gallery’s director, first met Le Roux Smith Le Roux during a visit to South Africa in 1948. Le Roux, then director of the Pretoria Art Centre, had been appointed to act as Rothenstein’s guide. He mounted a large reception in his guest’s honour and travelled widely with him. What almost […]
Angelica Kauffman was adept with a glass harmonica. Visiting her London studio in 1768, the Danish poet Helfrich Peter Sturz described her eliciting haunting chimes from a set of gradated glasses, with ‘her large expressive eyes devoutly cast upwards’. She also …
The Italian Renaissance was an age of nomads. Wandering painters, sculptors and workers in precious metals toted their technical skills from one city or court to another, perfectly ready to roll up a canvas, pack a painted panel or wrap a marble bust to be transported long distances down roads, rivers and canals. Everything, it […]
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts. Over the next few years, he exhibited a carefully selected mix of portraits – […]
Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy opens with an absence – the sort of absence that might have proved fatal to a book written by a less determined author. In his preface, Charles Darwent lists his fruitless searches of various archives and institutions for information on his subject: an art school established in 1930s London by the French artist Amédée Ozenfant. This paucity of sources haunts the book, and Darwent repeatedly makes his frustrations known. Where recollections do exist, he finds they are often contradictory or erroneous. Ozenfant is more or less forgotten today. In his time, however, he was influential and well connected. In 1918 he launched an artistic movement called Purism with a little-known Swiss architect called Charles-Edouard Jeanneret.
Virginia Woolf memorably claimed that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’. She was referring to the opening in London of the exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, curated by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Modern art had, suddenly, burst upon the town, and it created a sensation. What was it, though? What did it […]
Materials, notes Alain Corbin, emeritus professor of history at the Sorbonne, are integral to the way we think about time. We conceive of the deep past in terms of the ages of stone, bronze and iron, and more modern times have characteristic materials too. The Industrial Revolution is associated with coal, the late 19th and […]
As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters. Gifted siblings with intertwined lives present a fascinating challenge for the biographer. William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s interdependence has been dissected skilfully by Lucy Newlyn; Erika
The title of the self-proclaimed ‘scot-free Western Marxist’ T J Clark’s new anthology nods to an enigmatic line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’. In that poem, an ancient monument-maker has baked into a sculpture of the titular pharaoh his ‘sneer of cold command’, producing a searing critique of his patron, even while honouring him. […]
As a teenager I enjoyed the magazine Books and Bookmen, in which the two standout reviewers were Auberon Waugh and Douglas Cooper. From his irascible reviews, it seemed that the latter found fault with everybody and everything while maintaining an omniscience on matters of modern art. Among the arresting remarks I recall was Cooper’s claim […]
Picasso spent the last years of his life enjoying a final, unremitting spasm of creativity. He produced five or six paintings a day and seldom went out. He was living in Benjamin Guinness’s villa in Mougins, a walled property outside of which the paparazzi and fans gathered; journalists and the odd child from one of […]
The artworks sometimes called ‘gold-ground paintings’ or, much worse, ‘Italian primitives’ are normally the preserve of academic research and rarely the subject of exhibitions. The exhibition ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350’ at the National Gallery in London until 22 June is therefore trailblazing, as well as being one of the most glorious displays of […]
Don’t think of Threads of Empire as a book about just carpets. Rather, it is a fascinating exploration of the parts twelve carpets have played in world events. Carpets, usually woven by nameless women, have been desired throughout history by sultans and holy men, tycoons and tyrants, and their histories shed light on power dynamics […]
In 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques reached for their scissors, their glue and a stack of newspapers, and began to snip and stick. And so artistic collage was born. That, at least, is how the traditional history of the subject has it. Of course, the Cubists did not invent cutting and pasting. But, according […]
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Book reviews by Philip Womack
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Juggling balls, dead birds, lottery tickets, hypochondriac journalists. All the makings of an excellent collection. Loved Camille Bordas’s One Sun Only in the latest @Lit_Review
Natalie Perman - Normal People
Natalie Perman: Normal People - One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
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Despite adopting a pseudonym, George Sand lived much of her life in public view.
Lucasta Miller asks whether Sand’s fame has obscured her work.
Lucasta Miller - Life, Work & Adoration
Lucasta Miller: Life, Work & Adoration - Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
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