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“... an oblique and unsolicited tribute. There is evidence of this persistent dialogue of the deaf in John Hollander’s excellent book, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, a learned study of the tradition of ekphrasis – poetic description of paintings – illustrated by a ‘gallery’ of paintings and their tributary poems: Aretino on ...”

“... a Cafetière as sister to the immured (but undefeated) heroines of Beckett’s late monologues. John Elderfield, curator of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was ...”

“... painted in New York. American abstract art of the Fifties and Sixties owed much to Matisse. John Elderfield claims in his long introductory essay in the New York catalogue that ‘Matisse was alone when he began to discover that the very coloured stuff of which paintings are made can have an independent reality no less bodied and emotionally ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... of its maturity’, without trying to find validation for that style in personal tragedy, as John Berger apparently did. For Berger, Hyman writes, ‘the late nudes were the sole redeeming component in an oeuvre otherwise “intimate, contemplative, privileged”; it was the “tragedy” of his relationship with Marthe that “ensured his survival as a ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly ...”

“... of Modern Art in New York has started to issue a series called Studies in Modern Art, edited by John Elderfield (who was born in Middlesbrough and is another veteran of the Conceptualist/Modernist art school battles of circa 1970). The first of them, American Art of the 1960s, contains seven essays and is like a heavily illustrated, hardback academic ...”

“... temporary hang by a small team led by one of the very best living historians of modern art, John Elderfield, of works of 1880 to 1920 in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I cannot say much about its most hotly debated section, ‘People’, because my only sight of it was an hour’s visit hot from the airport on the night it ...”

“... in July 2020. Glancingly, the Tate Modern captioning alludes to its insights. The thesis of John Elderfield’s Cezanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings, which served as the Princeton show’s catalogue (Yale, £35), turned on Cezanne’s formative twenties, prior to his teaming up with Pissarro in Normandy. Back in Aix, his discussion circle had ...”