Eleanor Nairne

At his final​ White House Correspondents’ dinner, Barack Obama joked that he had been grizzled by the presidency while Michelle had barely aged a day. ‘She looks so happy to be here … That’s called practice. It’s like learning to do three-minute planks.’ Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama speaks to the effort of looking relaxed in the public...

The painter​ Cecily Brown offers a short biography on her website: ‘Born in London. Lives and works in New York’. But there is more to her than that. Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay; her father was the art critic David Sylvester, though she thought of him as an ‘uncle’ until she was 21. She took life drawing classes at Morley College in the late 1980s, which...

When Irving Sandler​ asked Joan Mitchell what she felt about the word ‘nature’, she didn’t mince her words: ‘I hate it. It reminds me of some Nature-Lover Going Out Bird-Watching.’ It was 1957 and Sandler was interviewing Mitchell in her fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. Mitchell’s gestural paintings were admired for their glowing abstraction,...

Writing of​ Ruth Asawa’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1954, the critic Parker Tyler described her sculptures as inviting the viewer ‘to be as still as they are or to tremble when they tremble’. He was responding to what had become her signature works: biomorphic forms woven from industrial wire, hung from the ceiling like lanterns. The first of these on display at...

In​ the first room of the Nam June Paik retrospective at Tate Modern (until 9 February), an 18th-century carved wooden Buddha sits on an oblong plinth. Facing him is an image of his own face, which is being recorded by a closed-circuit television camera and relayed onto a 1970s JVC ‘videosphere’. The monitor’s white plastic casing, which looks like an astronaut’s...