“... impulse is chilled have tended to be a Northern, and particularly a German speciality. Caspar David Friedrich’s mountains and deserted seashores are melancholy accounts of man’s place in nature. Emil Nolde’s seas and sunsets have no place for man at all. It is the way Kiefer’s work seems to refer to how things are, without spelling out precisely ...”

“... who looks back to Vermeer (he made his own version of a Vermeer letter-reader) and to Caspar David Friedrich’s woman at a window, painted in subdued greys, blacks, browns that owe something to Whistler. Gwen John, who was taught by Whistler, put on paint in calculated patches; the chalkiness of her paint and the thinness of Hammershøi’s match the ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image ...”

“... death), the seriousness and the sitter’s sober prosperity do not. When modern caricaturists like David Levine put pulled-about faces on small bodies their drawings project a more distinct personality than is found in their source material – usually paintings and photographs. The characterless little heads and drawn-out bodies of fashion plates do the ...”

“... you have actually seen: Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the Resistance, for instance, or David Lean’s Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Shadows of the Army. The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as it happens) on the soundtrack, and the words ‘Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied ...”

“... Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we see Kardashian talking to his shy young children at the ...”

“... the award in absentia, the absence of the other being the chief pleasure for each. This is where David Fincher’s new film, Mank, briefly in American cinemas last November and now available on Netflix, discreetly ends.The film was written by Fincher’s father, Jack, who died in 2003. Fincher had been planning to make it right after The Game (1997), one of ...”

“... the blame for everyone else. Unless of course it is the moon that is being killed. This is what David Grann, in the book on which the film is based, says about an old Western tradition:In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma … In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly ...”

“... on the other, it’s a picture of sublime, if slow, elevation, calling to mind Sisyphus, Caspar David Friedrich, Evel Knievel.Some of the allure of Horn’s sculptures resides in the way luxurious and disorienting materials contend with the work’s levels of reference and invocation. Gold Field, a sheet of gold foil laid on the floor, is inspired by the ...”

“... rock stars. The memoir the movie is based on, which has the same title, carries an epigraph from David Bowie: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’Well, perhaps this is not so comforting. A title card has told us the year – 1971 – and if we remember that a military dictatorship had been in power in the country since 1964, aided by ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... portraits of rulers which were the stock-in-trade of court artists in Europe from Velásquez to David. As the near pristine condition of many of them implies, portraits of the Qing imperial court were not designed for permanent hanging (they are watercolours).At what events were they originally viewed, and by whom? The imperial image was not disseminated to ...”

“... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...”

“... the Charing Cross Road’. Occasionally, the day’s work done, he goes to pubs and meets poets: David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very ...”

“... every few minutes the room would erupt with laughter, usually at some bleary-eyed sarcasm from David Davis. Francis Maude, laughing louder than anyone, would then restore everyone to order.’ On the other hand, Mr Anderson neatly decapitates a few enemies. One of them is the unfortunate David Shaw, MP for Dover, who is ...”