Paul Keegan

‘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...

Jones’s dedication to what he called ‘the contactual’ derived from this maternal Pool of London world, so vivid and particular. The yielding of wood and sail to steel and steam informed his sense of personal identity as a loyalty to lost causes (‘almost always the right’ ones), giving its character to his paradoxical modernism. When he read The Waste Land in the mid-1920s, the line ‘C.i.f. London: documents at sight’ was as a stone dropped down a well, echoing with riverside workshops, bills of lading, sight-drafts, brokerage, bonded goods and harbour dues. The odd relatives and elders who came to tea in Brockley were salts, nautical types plucked from the Victorian treasure chest and date-stamped (Dilworth remarks that they were both Dickensian and Dickensians). Their idioms prepared the boy’s ear for idiosyncrasy: the rooming-house world of his later years, stocked with splintery solitaries, was familiar from childhood.

In​ The Dream Colony, a memoir published posthumously in 2017, the gallerist and curator Walter Hopps mentions his first meeting with Andy Warhol, in New York in 1961, when Warhol was a successful commercial artist looking for a way out. ‘We agreed to keep in touch and see what came along. And what came along … were the 32 original Campbell’s Soup Cans.’ Hopps...