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“... by initiates is heightened by the slow-dawning certainty that the Marcus Gutteridge talked to by John Mortimer is a made-up person, a chimera of all those doddering reminiscers (‘Aldous was extremely short-sighted’) whom young literary journalists feel obliged to interview. Well, of course, now I see it, and now that I’m in the joke very funny it is ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... outlined in an article of May 1939. The contemporary American art, which included work by Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell and Baziotes, was legitimised, and in some measure influenced, by the European imports that hung around the corner. What we find in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice today encapsulates this relationship between her European ...”

“... of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival vortex, or remaining on the surface of the canvas, seeing it as a physical object rather than an imaginary space. For perspectival recession read historical ...”

“... by Continental tachisme, with its blots and smears, and by Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock at work on his drip paintings. Ayres responded by laying great boards on the floor and splattering them with hardware shop enamel paints in black, sienna, flame red and prussian blue. The high spirits of this experimentation still bubble up through the ...”

“... York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The question is left hanging but the answer, in Tate’s case, is that this little practical joke would surely have gone out into the world without its best gag. Had the guests at Modern ...”

“... espoused an aesthetic of improvisation. In ‘Green River Cemetery: Springs’ – O’Hara and Pollock are buried there – Kleinzahler wanders among the dead until he feels he can almost hear ‘the rages, dishing and whispered come-ons,/the posturing and retort/at that murderous cocktail party, the Fifties’. But he also interprets the careers of both ...”

“... every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to happen. Years later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun ...”

“... status’, so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators capable of insisting that the true home of modern art was St Ives or Yorkshire? ‘Pretending that it was is complacent, insular and either intellectually dishonest or genuinely stupid.’ How ...”

“... in flimsy Billy. The God of his fathers still mattered. Billy was as spattered as a Jackson Pollock painting, and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy – streaks of sexual weakness, sexual humiliation. At the same time, he had to have his name in the paper. As someone said, he had a bug-like tropism for ...”

“... The work in The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock is from the British Museum’s own holdings. One of the four Edward Hopper etchings is Evening Wind. A naked girl kneeling on a bed looks out through an open window. Curtains billow inwards. Her head, turned from you, is hidden by long hair which is pushed about by the wind ...”

“... The hefty strokes in the late Picasso are still European painterly, the black tangle of the 1951 Pollock was made by a painter who hadn’t been conditioned to use a brush that way, while the de Kooning and Twombly could be set up as another contrasting pair – the one with a painterly and the other a scrawly version of the same round-hand script.Sylvester ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... bracketed, say, by Life’s January 1951 photograph of the 15 ‘irascible’ New York painters (Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko et al) who’d made the news by issuing an open letter denouncing the Metropolitan Museum’s show American Painting Today, 1950, and Andy Warhol’s Get Smart cover for TV Guide in March 1966. Unable to place their work in established ...”

“... He also detected fluid in my right lung and swelling in my ankles. He referred me to the John Radcliffe Hospital’s ambulatory assessment unit the next day. For the time being, he said, I could forget flying home. After years of negative articles in the US media about overworked doctors, cursory exams and brusque support staff, I wasn’t expecting ...”