Susannah Clapp

‘Woman and Vegetation’ (1945)

André​ Breton gave one of the best descriptions: ‘the rocket I’ll call Baya’. He also gave some of the worst: ‘a being as frail as she is talented’, ‘the child that is Baya’. Excitement vibrates around the subject of Alice Kaplan’s biography Seeing Baya (Chicago, £21). The artistic gift...

For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry Carney, as dark blue hessian. Adam Faith’s last words were ‘Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it?’

There are nuggets, visual and verbal, at every turn of The Madman’s...

Francis Picabia, ‘Tete de femme’ (c.1941-42)© The Estate of Francis Picabia. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

For a long stretch​ of her long life, Jean Rhys was thought to be dead: drowned in the Seine, they said. For some of it she was thought to be a fraud. In 1949 a neighbour in Beckenham who knew her by the name of her husband (who was a real fraud) accused her of...

Hallie​ Flanagan: a woman killed by Congress. Or at least by Congress-approved committee. From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures, a dramatic instance of imagination spurred by political principle. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than a thousand plays, estimated...

‘Iago’ (1867)

He is not​ one of her Great Men. After all, he has no beard. Yet the 1867 portrait that Julia Margaret Cameron called ‘Iago’ is her most startling photograph. The face, captured so close up as to suggest a 21st-century candour, has the long features and brooding gaze of Frank Finlay, who played the villain to Laurence Olivier’s grimacing Moor....