“Why have there been no great women artists?” It is a silly question, really, and the art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) certainly thought so when a male gallerist put it to her.
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Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future.
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The latest novel by the writer and musician Jenny Hval is a bubbling cauldron of chaos, as surreal and skewed as her debut, Paradise Rot.
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The list was long and hand-written, spidery in black ink. It was structured by shop, the name of each underlined and followed by the shopkeeper’s name in brackets. It had a neat tear along one side and a doe-eyed donkey wearing a bulky saddle bag on the reverse. When my mother handed it over, saddle-side up, I said, ‘You ought to get me one of those.’
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When Rachel Cohen was a child, she tried to etch her future self in her mind. “I hoped, when I grew older, I would be able to somehow come back and revisit this version of myself and tell her what had happened.”
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When Eileen Cooper was a child, her mother used to sit and draw with her in biro on a notepad. “Not that she was ever able to pursue a career in art and I don’t know if she ever had an interest really,” says Eileen, “but I obviously did.”
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A woman wheels towards a large blank canvas. In one hand she brandishes a brush, in the other a palette daubed with paint. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her fine silk dress, the lacy white fringe of her chemise curling over the cuffs.
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Cromwell Place is in good company. Spread across five white, stucco-fronted Victorian townhouses in London’s South Kensington, the new exhibition and co-working space shares a neighbourhood with world-renowned art, design and history institutions.
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Smart collectors follow their taste and inclinations when they’re buying but they also have the nose to expand and explore new fields. We speak to four insiders about where the market is heading – and what sectors are piquing their interest.
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Zanele Muholi’s black-and-white portraits are as beautiful as they are harrowing.
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The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey.
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When Prudence Flint started to paint women in everyday settings, her work was promptly described as “domestic”. “It’s not a sexy title, is it?” she asks. “It felt confusing because if I put a woman outside she was subject to another limit and scrutiny. So I started to think about dreams and giving myself space in that way.”
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Man Ray was a reluctant photographer. His career behind the camera was cash-driven and he famously claimed that ‘photography is not art’.
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For a curator, coming up with an original proposition for a museum show of an artist as revered and exhibited as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) can be quite the challenge. The solution devised by the curator Aurélie Verdier was to invite audiences to “re-read” the French artist.
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It was spring and I was there to save my marriage. Not by having a baby, as couples have been known to do, but by confirming that my insides were barren. Rob had told me early on that he always imagined his life without children. That’s fine, I remember laughing, I’m not exactly yearning for motherhood. But then I noticed how I was patting my pockets. My keys, my phone, my wallet. I felt all the time like I’d forgotten something.
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I hadn’t heard from my mother for a month. Normally she left a voicemail once a week, informing me of her and Stanley’s whereabouts, occasionally asking how I was and even more occasionally asking after my own husband. Then, all of a sudden, she announced she was in London. Could we meet for breakfast? I wanted to say no, I didn’t have time. I’d love to, I said. Can’t be too picky when you’re one parent down.
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Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals make you stop and think. Not necessarily about what they represent but how you feel. Their brooding veils of colour and blurry outlines draw you in. They’re like windows and doors, portals into another realm, with dusky planes and ragged edges.
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The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’.
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It began with a tweet. Nicole Tersigni was scrolling through Twitter when she stumbled upon a man explaining one of her friend’s jokes back to her – something she’d experienced several times herself – and decided to make a joke of her own.
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About a quarter of the way through Eliza Clark’s debut novel Boy Parts, the protagonist, Irina, describes her ability as a photographer. “I could train a camera on a man and look at him like a man looks at a woman; boys, too, could be objects of desire.”
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