Paul Keegan

‘Cut Meringues’ by Wayne Thiebaud (1961).Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

In a statement​ to accompany the accession of Cut Meringues by the Museum of Modern Art following his first New York exhibition in 1962, Wayne Thiebaud suggested that each era produces its own still life. Rather than the props and evidences of discreetly arranged...

‘The Studio’ (1969)

The virtue​ of Philip Guston at Tate Modern is to leave his outsiderishness intact – his oddity will not go away – while suggesting that Guston might be the mid-century American painter who matters most now. Or who can still offend. Philip Guston Now was the original title of the show, which was scheduled for 2021 but postponed by the...

Maurice Blanchot​ , represented in this anthology by the opaque and mesmerising ‘The Madness of the Day’ (1949), wrote that a story is not the relation of an event but the event itself. It seems true that short stories are often less easy to summarise than novels, with no need to tidy loose ends, or even any obligation to end, and that their content often communicates something...

When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy.’ Eliot...