John-Paul Stonard

The​ German painter Jörg Immendorff died in 2007, at the age of 61, after a long period suffering from motor neurone disease. His reputation had been tarnished by a scandal a few years earlier involving cocaine and prostitutes, but by this stage his artistic career had in any case already begun to falter; his late works never quite captured the success of his Café Deutschland...

Howard Hodgkin has finished a new painting. It is called Summer Rain, and is painted with oils on a framed wooden panel, about two metres in length and just over one metre high. At the centre a pinkish-brown form like a cool fireball rises vividly against a background of luxuriant green – foliage perhaps, or even palm trees, which appear often in Hodgkin’s pictures. A band of...

The American artist Christopher Wool’s large abstract paintings are often beautiful, but they are so emptied of content that it is at first hard to know what to make of them. For the first ten years or so after he came to attention in the mid-1980s, he was considered an artist’s artist: he didn’t have a large public following or much of an international reputation. All this...