Eleanor Birne

The centrepiece​ of the Fahrelnissa Zeid show at Tate Modern (until 8 October) is My Hell, a vast canvas – five metres across and two metres high – of swirling curves and broken triangles. It’s a diptych or possibly a triptych: yellows and blacks in the left section, blacks and reds to the right, arranged around a jagged absence close to the middle. The forms seem to...

I was working​ as a part-time bookseller in the university holidays when the Flamingo sales rep stopped by with a proof of Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things. I wasn’t senior enough to buy books for the shop – that responsibility fell to the managers – but I picked up the pink and black paperback he had left on the counter and opened it. You...

According to​ its account of itself, the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge is the ‘most significant’ collection of modern women’s art in Europe. There isn’t much competition: women-only art collections are rare things, outside Washington’s vast National Museum of Women in the Arts (five thousand artworks by a thousand artists, from...

At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother. He...

The first picture​ you come across in Tate Modern’s vast and various exhibition Performing for the Camera (until 12 June) is Yves Klein’s arresting and now iconic Leap into the Void (1960). It’s the jumping-off point for the whole show and it features the artist himself, well, jumping off. He’s throwing himself from a building in a suburban Paris street and is...