I’ve always had a thing for Paris. Not necessarily Paris today, but the City of Light as captured in the 19th-century by the writers and other artists who would have rubbed shoulders in its café-concerts and galleries with Caillebotte.
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Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.
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The first time I saw her, I didn’t make it past her face. My eyes caught on her jagged fringe, brushed to a sheen, and her flushed cheeks, an entirely different shade from her porcelain neck and chest.
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In Wreck, artist Tom de Freston asks the reader the same question (“Is it all lost?“) that he asked himself in March 2020, when his studio caught fire and the blaze consumed a career’s worth of work.
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Enter the exhibition and you might feel as if you’ve walked in on a conversation. Sixteen of the thirty-five surviving self-portraits painted in Van Gogh’s final four years, beginning when he was thirty-three, are hung at the same height across two rooms.
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Sometimes you have to look back in order to move forward. Today several young artists are dipping into old art forms both to situate themselves within the canon and to start new conversations.
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. For Alicia Eggert, the opposite is true. The Dallas-based artist thinks in terms of ideas and messages rather than images.
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How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady reads reviews, she tends to ‘scan the first five or six lines, skip to the last two or three, and end up thinking, what’s with these people?’
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It’s clever marketing, really – the notion that creativity comes from the lone genius. It plays into the human fascination with famous names and gives us what we’ve been taught every good story needs: a protagonist.
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Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender to funny to cynical to sinister — the beat goes on uninterrupted.
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Light and dark are threaded throughout this spellbinding and sometimes scary exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant final two decades of Louise Bourgeois' long career.
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The first thing you see upon entering ‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’, a striking new exhibition at Two Temple Place, is Ladi Kwali and Kiln, a black-and-white photograph taken in the early 1960s.
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Laura Knight was still in her teens when she first flouted convention. Banned from drawing nudes at art school because she was a woman, she hired a private model to pose for her at home.
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Masha looks cold. She’s chalky white with rosy cheeks and a shiny nose. Her lips are gently pressed together, and her eyes are glassy and wet like they’ve been leaking in the wind. She appears not to have any eyebrows, and her eyelashes are barely visible.
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Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts radiate a delicate power. It’s there in the light and airy lavenders and blush pinks, and the deep blues and bottle greens that gleam like beetles.
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It’s a fact that the Courtauld has reopened to the public following a three-year, £57m makeover, but I can’t help thinking about fiction.
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When Aya Haidar was ten years old, someone asked her what her mum did for a living. She remembers replying, “Oh, my mum doesn’t do anything, she’s just a mum.” Her dad, who rarely raised his voice, told her he didn’t want to hear her saying that ever again.
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The mostly young women in Clare Sestanovich’s pithy first collection of short stories are drifting, with “nonspecific” jobs, “mild” preferences, and “vague” creative ambition.
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About two-thirds of the way through her engaging new book, Emma Lewis describes the subtle yet significant distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’.
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A woman with dark hair and matching wing-like eyebrows lounges on a bed amid clashing fabrics. She’s casually propped up against a squashy pillow and her ankles are crossed.
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