At Tate Modern

Brian Dillon: Klein/Moriyama, 22 November 2012

... work, where he was the graphic equal of Irving Penn and a far stranger photographer than, say, David Bailey or Richard Avedon. But then he has long been ambivalent about his fashion photography; already in 1966 he had skewered that milieu with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, the first in a series of satirical films that would take up much of his next ...

At Tate Britain

James Cahill: Frank Bowling, 15 August 2019

... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...

At the Royal Academy

Craig Clunas: Art of the Emperors, 1 December 2005

... 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 ...

Iran and the UN

Norman Dombey: Iran and the UN, 23 February 2006

... is correct when it states that non-weapon states party to the NPT have a right to enrich uranium. David Edwards, a former legal counsellor at the Foreign Office, has written that ‘safeguards are designed to detect diversion of materials for military or unknown purposes. Nothing in the NPT or safeguards agreements legally prevents a state party to them from ...

Yugoslavia’s Past

Robert Kee, 5 June 1980

Moscow Diary 
by Veljko Micunovic, translated by David Floyd.
Chatto, 474 pp., £12.95, April 1980, 0 7011 2469 5
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... The story runs that the reason Tito lived so long in his last illness was that no one in the Presidential Council dared be the first to suggest that the various life-supporting machines should be switched off. Maybe in the end someone dared. Or maybe Tito, whose body in life had done so much to reconcile the politically irreconcilable in Yugoslavia, performed its final patriotic service in death ...

Counting signatures

Christopher Hill, 22 January 1981

Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £12.50, October 1980, 0 521 22514 0
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... This is the first full-scale study of literacy in 16th and 17th-century England. Dr Cressy has long been known to scholars for his work on the subject: here he gives us his conclusions. For the whole of his period, he thinks, about two out of three adult males, and about 90 per cent of women, were illiterate. Proportions varied from region to region ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘I’m Still Here’, 6 March 2025

... 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 ...

Big Books

Penelope Fitzgerald, 15 September 1988

William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry 
by J.M.S. Tompkins.
Cecil Woolf, 368 pp., £20, May 1988, 0 900821 84 1
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... is on his wholeness. In the annotated biography which they bring out in two-yearly instalments, David and Sheila Latham ‘resist categorising under such subjects as poetry and politics because we believe that each of Morris’s interests is best understood in the context of his whole life’s work.’ Joyce Tompkins, also, wants to see Morris whole. ‘The ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Hamish Fulton, 9 May 2002

... 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 ...

At the White Cube

Peter Campbell: Anselm Kiefer, 22 February 2007

... 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 ...

At Tate Modern

Peter Campbell: The fairground at Bankside, 22 June 2006

... associations. Murals and altarpieces take on something from the churches they were painted for; David Smith’s, Rodin’s and Brancusi’s sculpture looked best in their studios. Donald Judd has gone so far as to develop the Chinati Foundation in Texas just to show his work; you can see why the pieces by him in one of the most successful rooms in the new ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, 16 November 2023

... 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 ...

At the Museum Ludwig

Brian Dillon: Roni Horn’s Conceptualism, 1 August 2024

... 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 ...

Diary

Maya Jasanoff: In Sierra Leone, 11 September 2008

... a welcome end to their journey. ‘There was great joy to see the land,’ the Baptist preacher David George recalled. ‘The high mountain, at some distance . . . appeared like a cloud to us.’ They had retched and ached through seven weeks of storms and pernicious fevers at sea. Now they raised three cheers and fired a salute. Their British officers ...

Miss Lachrymose

Liz Brown: Doris Day’s Performances, 11 September 2008

Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door 
by David Kaufman.
Virgin, 628 pp., £29.95, June 2008, 978 1 905264 30 8
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... he loved Doris’s money more’. What if you sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me? David Kaufman doesn’t quote Patty Andrews on the matter, but he does say that she showed up one night at Doris Day’s front door swinging a baseball bat. After an hour no one had answered and she went away again, but the image lingers. A tall, pushy ...