Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.
To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance develop unevenly over time, ‘anachronically’, in myriad acts of reception? With his jagged punctuation Joseph Leo Koerner, demonstrates, effectively, that this is not an either/or.
An hour into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from . . .
Luis Buñuel worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s . . .
In 1345, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a monumental mappa mundi for the wall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. At the axis of its rotating concentric wheels was the little city. For painters, Siena was . . .
Every March, over the course of four days, thousands and thousands of dogs go to a conference centre outside Birmingham. They arrive in waves, the dogs, according to the order in which they will be . . .
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.
Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.
Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
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.
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.
‘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...
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.
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...
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...
Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.
Writing about the press by Andrew O’Hagan, Ross McKibbin, Jenny Diski, James Meek, Suzanne Moore, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Rusbridger, Thomas Nagel and Raymond Williams.
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...
Terrence Malick is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...
Victor Hugo was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...
Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...
Noah Davis’s work is distinguished by a revelry and a commitment to the figures he brings into his image world. There are few non-Black subjects here. That in itself was a political choice, as well as...
‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the...
We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time. The apparent...
Alasdair Gray’s illustrations tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of...
Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave...
Insofar as Dora Carrington has had a wider reputation, it has rested chiefly on her landscapes. In 2014, Farm at Watendlath (1921) came second in a poll to find the most popular works in British museums....
While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead:...
Picasso’s perpetual object is the human body, which is everywhere remodelled, schematised and simplified, rendered breathtakingly beautiful one moment and grotesquely ugly the next, and always treated...
Pressburger described their collaboration as a great romance: ‘Powell knows what I am going to say even before I say it – maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare. You are lucky...
Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...
Some critics feel the effervescence of I’m Still Here is an avoidance of reality. I agree that something seems off here. The carnival effect is definitely excessive, but Walter Salles can hardly not...
The Yoko Ono who makes prickly, sprawling rock albums can seem an altogether different artist from the one whose text scores – with their concise invitations to creativity contained in neat squares –...
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my...
Unlike large oil paintings, miniatures demand to be experienced close up. They had the great virtue of being portable – and, therefore, of helping to create intimacy (or the illusion of intimacy) over...
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