Arts & Culture

Stanley Kubrick on the set of ‘Barry Lyndon’, 1975. (Photo: Screen Archives / Getty).

Kubrick Does It Himself

David Bromwich

26 September 2024

It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare, or sudden and concussive, as in a boxing match or a duel. He is never in it for the spectacle, he never invites the audience to share the thrill of men destroying one another: the feeling is cold, a turn-off.

Read more about Spaces between the Stars: Kubrick Does It Himself

‘Only the River Flows’

Michael Wood

26 September 2024

One of the​ most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options . . .

Lucian Freud’s Sitters

Celia Paul

12 September 2024

Lucian Freud​ resembled certain film directors – Ingmar Bergman, for example – in that the lead characters in his works influenced the way the creation took shape, often guiding it into entirely . . .

On Women’s Gymnastics

Jean McNicol

15 August 2024

Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, silver medal-winner in the all-around at consecutive Olympics, on the beam. Aweek​ before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese . . .

Arthur Russell's Benediction

Ian Penman

15 August 2024

Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had . . .

Picasso and Tragedy

T.J. Clark, 17 August 2017

Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.

Read more about Picasso and Tragedy

Swoonatra

Ian Penman, 2 July 2015

Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.

Read more about Swoonatra

Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.

Read more about Is Wagner bad for us?

At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.

Read more about At the End of My Pencil

It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

Gilberto Perez, 27 June 2002

A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.

Read more about It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Michael Wood, 7 September 2000

‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...

Read more about That Wooden Leg: Conversations with Don Luis

Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.

Read more about Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

The Raphael Question

Lawrence Gowing, 15 March 1984

When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...

Read more about The Raphael Question

Dressing and Undressing

Anita Brookner, 15 April 1982

Fashion,​ according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...

Read more about Dressing and Undressing

I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Sophie Lewis, 1 August 2024

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

Read more about I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Roni Horn’s attention here is fixed on something more indefinite than ordinary, obvious reflexivity about image-making and artifice, something that slips between images, between moments, between words...

Read more about At the Museum Ludwig: Roni Horn’s Conceptualism

Guardainfantes: Sartorial Diplomacy

Nicola Jennings, 1 August 2024

Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...

Read more about Guardainfantes: Sartorial Diplomacy

Käthe Kollwitz aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ she once remarked. ‘But...

Read more about At MoMA: Käthe Kollwitz’s Figures

Diary: My Niche

Mendez, 4 July 2024

Last year I narrated Pelé’s My Autobiography – yes, I am the queer voice of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. This presented the challenge of voicing problematic and dated views, especially...

Read more about Diary: My Niche

There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....

Read more about The Talk of Carshalton: Pauline Boty’s Presence

At the Royal Academy: On Angelica Kauffman

Brigid von Preussen, 20 June 2024

Again and again, Kauffman portrays herself holding a stylus and portfolio, the symbols not of painting but of drawing, of the intellectual and imaginative efforts that precede the messy work of the brush.

Read more about At the Royal Academy: On Angelica Kauffman

At the Movies: 'The Dead Don't Hurt'

Michael Wood, 20 June 2024

Another title for The Dead Don’t Hurt could be ‘Western Promises’, but this movie is a very late contribution to the genre. Only the worst promises are kept. The familiar nostalgia for loneliness...

Read more about At the Movies: 'The Dead Don't Hurt'

On the Nightingale

Mary Wellesley, 6 June 2024

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...

Read more about On the Nightingale

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting....

Read more about Orgasm isn’t my bag: On the ‘Village Voice’

In Surrealism’s first decade ‘transgression’ was the watchword: Breton advocated it, and Bataille both practised and theorised it. There was a residual bourgeois order with more or less clear lines...

Read more about Big toes are gross: Surrealism's Influence

At the Movies: ‘La Chimera’

Michael Wood, 23 May 2024

When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is final, and that’s all we need to know, or can know?

Read more about At the Movies: ‘La Chimera’

On Jan Lievens

John-Paul Stonard, 23 May 2024

Jan Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions.

Read more about On Jan Lievens

Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...

Read more about I am only interested in women who struggle: On Sarah Maldoror

Higher Ordinariness: Poor Surrey

Jonathan Meades, 23 May 2024

Surrey comes from a different time. It is, to appropriate Surreyspeak, forever a wholly unconvincing approximation of yore (1450-1600). It comes from a different place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed,...

Read more about Higher Ordinariness: Poor Surrey

Diary: Art and Memory

Julian Barnes, 9 May 2024

We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. But memory...

Read more about Diary: Art and Memory

One way of refusing to see the difference between making a movie and talking about one is to remember that films often talk, literally and obliquely, about film. 

Read more about A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

‘The artist,’ Jacques Lacan wrote, ‘always precedes [the analyst].’ Great works of art had already illuminated even the most deeply hidden features of the phenomena he sought to describe.

Read more about At the Pompidou-Metz: ‘Lacan: L’Exposition’

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences