Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a history of pink, which may not be ‘a color in its own right’ and for which neither Latin nor ancient Greek has a standard word (it was long regarded as a shade of red). Nevertheless, Pink is as sumptuous as its predecessors, printed on gorgeous glossy paper and written with impassioned scholarship.
I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me into a world of lonely lights in wild country, spectral Gothic abbeys in fitful moonlight, midnight processions of cowled, torch-bearing monks. These […]
There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would include some stinkers. Guests would complain about cold, cramped rooms and comfortless furniture. And that would be without mentioning the dining options. For a time, Mondrian seemed to live on nothing but lentils. On the plus side, there would be jazz and dancing and handmade artworks. The maker of abstract grids enclosing lozenges of colour
For the modernist designer Enid Marx, folk art, or what she called ‘popular art’, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’. Marx and her partner, the historian Margaret Lambert, collected samplers, Staffordshire flatbacks, lustrewares, ship’s figureheads, boldly carved animals made for fairground merry-go-rounds, pub signs, theatrical tinsel pictures, bargee art, puppets, […]
All art is a product of its time, but few movements have been as irrevocably tied to a political moment as Impressionism. The careers of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and the artists who inspired them, notably Courbet and Manet, assumed shapes forced on them by the upheavals of 19th-century France, in particular the events that brought […]
Jacques-Louis David, the leading artist of the French Revolution, sketched Marie Antoinette as few had seen her before. Perched on the edge of her seat on the way to her execution, arms bound, lank hair poking free of a decidedly unglamorous cap, David’s queen looks resigned, drawn and peculiarly ordinary. Yet there is a discernible […]
You would think that there were dozens of histories of British art out there, along the lines of an art history course I came across titled ‘Caveman to Picasso’. Oddly, there are not, and those that exist cannot always be trusted. This most enjoyable book is an exception.
Bendor Grosvenor says in his introduction, ‘The story of the development of British art is rarely told in a single, chronological account, and partly for this reason, our understanding of how British art evolved, who made it, for whom, and what it represents, has been distorted.’
When murals by Banksy appeared all over London like a stencilled rash in the summer, there seemed something familiar about the reaction to them. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly. Then it hit me. It was like when Tom Cruise has a curry at an out-of-town restaurant. He was here! That’s him in […]
In the 19th century, Pugin and Morris brought a new impetus to the making of stained glass. Nonetheless, until well into the 20th century, the design and the creation of stained glass remained largely separate. Few individuals wishing to commission a memorial window looked beyond the designs of saints by Burne-Jones and Dearle’s foliage backgrounds. […]
This book offers a challenge. John Stewart, a retired architect now an architectural historian, encourages us when we walk the city streets to raise our eyes to parapet level and open our minds to the incredible ornamental detail and range of symbols that bedeck major public and institutional buildings. The work of the architectural sculptor […]
This remarkable book begins dramatically and truthfully: ‘A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head. It eats the hours, this child, leaving me only crumbs.’ Motherhood can be overwhelming, however longed for. It is never a small thing, even if the rest of the world chooses to ignore it or view it as a block to professionalism. Cyril Connolly’s remark in Enemies of Promise, ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’,
The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings
In 1686, the haiku master Matsuo Bashō penned one of Japan’s most celebrated poems, a simple description of a frog jumping into an old pond and the resulting sound. It captures a moment in seventeen syllables with Zen perspicacity. What is often forgotten, however, is its visual dimension. In its original form the verse would […]
I knew Gilbert Spencer during the last decade of his life and had the pleasure (mixed with some pain) of curating his only London retrospective, at The Fine Art Society in Bond Street, five years before he died in 1979. I can’t say I embarked on it in all innocence, as I was well aware that […]
By any standard, Wassily Kandinsky lived an unusual and dramatic life. He was born in Moscow in 1866. His father was a prosperous merchant from eastern Siberia who imported tea from China via the border town of Kyakhta, while his mother came from a genteel family of Baltic German ancestry. Due to his father’s poor […]
The jet-setting, apparently highly successful American art dealer Inigo Philbrick suddenly vanished from Miami in late 2019, leaving at least $86 million of debt. Accusations of fraud, double-dealing, forgery and inventing fictitious buyers for works he didn’t even own had begun to swirl around him. With lawsuits piling up, this ‘Bernie Madoff of the art […]
If not always reliable as a historian, Gertrude Stein did get it right in her 1940 memoir, Paris France. The reason the city she had moved to in 1903 had suddenly taken off as a hotbed of modernism thirty years earlier lay in France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After 1871, looking backwards meant revisiting […]
Last month, the Taliban government in Afghanistan indulged in a particularly malicious act towards women, passing a law closing all beauty salons. Having run a truck through all other freedoms, it attacked the one remaining place where women could still find employment and meet and mingle outside the home. Did those heroic religious warriors really see such
The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortunate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory drawings, seemed to imbue his productions with an almost divine stamp of approval. Most German painters of the era did not sign their work, but Dürer was […]
When Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art reaches bookshops, it will, undoubtedly, be placed on a table between Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art without Men (which came out last summer) and Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (published in May this year). Hessel’s book does what it says on the tin, […]
Spring has sprung and here is the April issue of @Lit_Review featuring @sophieolive on Dorothea Tanning, @JamesCahill on Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, @lifeisnotanovel on Stephanie Wambugu, @BaptisteOduor on Gwendoline Riley and so much more: http://literaryreview.co.uk
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Spring has sprung and here is the April issue of @Lit_Review featuring @sophieolive on Dorothea Tanning, @JamesCahill on Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, @lifeisnotanovel on Stephanie Wambugu, @BaptisteOduor on Gwendoline Riley and so much more: http://literaryreview.co.uk
A review of my biography of Wittgenstein, and of his newly published last love letters, in the Literary Review: via @Lit_Review
Jane O'Grady - It’s a Wonderful Life
Jane O'Grady: It’s a Wonderful Life - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb;...
literaryreview.co.uk
It was my pleasure to review Stephanie Wambugu’s enjoyably Ferrante-esque debut Lonely Crowds for @Lit_Review’s April issue, out now
Joseph Williams - Friends Disunited
Joseph Williams: Friends Disunited - Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
literaryreview.co.uk