Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... the most appealing a beaker on a dish with a rose belonging to the Saltwood Bequest and so to Alan Clark who is somewhere about, though I don’t see (or hear) him. Then there are lots of terrible flower paintings before some wonderful Goyas in the last room, including a heap of dead fish. The look in the eye of one of the dead bream seems familiar then I ...

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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... Stella, the enfant terrible of geometric abstraction. Colour-field painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, whose work Newman had influenced but didn’t encourage, were also on the rise, and Greenberg had swung much of his support to them. Newman was now recognised as the co-leader, with de Kooning, of the New York School – they ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri Lankan, Susil ...