At Dia:Beacon

Hal Foster: Fetishistic Minimalist, 5 June 2003

... the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both these spaces were industrial structures redesigned by Richard Gluckman, who is as much an architect of the Dia aesthetic – a Modernist transparency of structure rendered with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the ...

Homage to the Provinces

Peter Campbell, 22 March 1990

Wright of Derby 
by Judy Egerton.
Tate Gallery, 294 pp., £25, February 1990, 1 85437 038 3
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... is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same year is a tumble of satin and lace; a veil blows from her shoulder and flowers garland her bosom, but despite the mobile stuffs her face is as still, her back as rigid, as Anne Bateman’s. The catalogue suggests ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1990, 24 January 1991

... a policeman leaps from the car, and ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall, shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’ and the young man is taken away without a struggle.The presence of seven cars, and at least twenty policemen not one of them with the sense just to walk up the street, makes me feel the young man deserved to get away with ...

At the National Portrait Gallery

Peter Campbell: Wyndham Lewis, 11 September 2008

... be icons if we knew nothing about the sitters. Even unforgettable photographs like the one Richard Avedon took of Pound in the late 1950s are attached to one time and place. The Lewis portraits represent the man rather than the man at a given moment. Eliot, hair neatly parted, three-piece grey suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, is the conservative ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter Campbell: Degas, 6 October 2011

... outlines, to an extreme position that is the essence of the dance step. Much of the catalogue by Richard Kendall (who also produced an excellent catalogue for the 1996 exhibition Degas: Beyond Impressionism) and Jill DeVonyar is about making images of things that happened too fast to be recorded by the most attentive eye or quickest hand. But the exhibition ...

At Kew

Peter Campbell: The New Alpine House, 21 April 2005

... exhibition in a blacked out subterranean space at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station at Wapping Wall – itself an impressive piece of plant, dear to industrial archaeologists – gave an insight into their work. There you can see a double display: Reflections (an installation, prepared for the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale by the architects and the ...

The Terror Trail

Tariq Ali: The real story of Daniel Pearl, 20 May 2004

A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Daniel Pearl 
by Mariane Pearl.
Virago, 278 pp., £7.99, March 2004, 1 84408 126 5
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Who Killed Daniel Pearl? 
by Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Duckworth, 454 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7156 3261 2
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... have already been forgotten. An exception is Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, who, early in 2002, was lured to a fashionable restaurant in Karachi, kidnapped and then executed by his captors. A video showing Pearl’s throat being slit was distributed to the Western media and a gruesome clip was shown on CBS ...

Done Deal

Christopher Hitchens: Nixon in China, 5 April 2001

A Great WallSix Presidents and China 
by Patrick Tyler.
PublicAffairs, 512 pp., £11.99, September 2000, 1 58648 005 7
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... Party member to have become a dissident, and one of the founders of the ‘Democracy Wall’ movement. No sooner had Christopher got off his plane than he was confronted by Li Peng, who had been the hardest of the hardliners in urging a bloody end to the Tiananmen protests: Li Peng unleashed a torrent of invective against American interference in ...

Just like Mother

Theo Tait: Richard Yates, 6 February 2003

Collected Stories 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 474 pp., £17.99, January 2002, 0 413 77125 3
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 346 pp., £6.99, February 2001, 0 413 75710 2
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The Easter Parade 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 226 pp., £10, January 2003, 0 413 77202 0
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... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...

Poets and Pretenders

John Sutherland, 2 April 1987

The Great Pretender 
by James Atlas.
Viking, 239 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 9780670814619
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The Position of the Body 
by Richard Stern.
Northwestern, 207 pp., $21.95, November 1986, 0 8101 0730 9
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The Setting Sun and the Rolling World 
by Charles Mungoshi.
Heinemann, 202 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 434 48166 1
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Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 162 Years after his Lordship’s Death 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 174 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 9780224024235
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... elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with ...

Diary

Julian Barnes: Art and Memory, 9 May 2024

... it, and my hoped-for coup had turned out a failure because of my own stupidity. I hung it on the wall with some reluctance.Buying a work of art is often an instinctual business: you see it, you like it, it speaks to you and you may or may not think about its ‘true’ worth, as opposed to its worth to you. No wonder the rich have art advisers to guide and ...

For Want of a Dinner Jacket

Christopher Tayler: Becoming O’Brian, 6 May 2021

Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life 
by Nikolai Tolstoy.
William Collins, 608 pp., £10.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 835062 8
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... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...

Bitter as never before

David Blackbourn: Einstein, 3 February 2000

Einstein's German World 
by Fritz Stern.
Princeton, 335 pp., £15.95, October 1999, 9780691059396
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... This salute from one German-Jewish Nobel laureate to another was written six months before the Wall Street Crash helped to make National Socialism a mass movement, and it introduces some of Fritz Stern’s central themes. They include the impact of the First World War, which we can now see as the foundational event in the history of the short 20th ...

Why all the hoopla?

Hal Foster: Frank Gehry, 23 August 2001

Frank Gehry: The Art of Architecture 
edited by Jean-Louis Cohen et al.
Abrams, 500 pp., £55, May 2001, 0 8109 6929 7
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... at Harvard, in Paris, and with various firms, he opened his own office in 1962. Influenced by Richard Neutra, the Austrian emigré who also practised locally, Gehry gradually turned a Modernist idiom into a funky LA vernacular. He did so primarily in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building ...

It’s Modern but is it contemporary?

Hal Foster, 16 December 2004

... by Rodin – not an obvious host except that here you first see, through a gorgeous glass curtain-wall, the Sculpture Garden below, which Taniguchi has spruced up with pools, trees and terraces. You turn again – suspended above you now is a green helicopter from the Architecture and Design Department – and climb to a great atrium, 110 feet ...