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.
By the end of 1979, hesitation had given way to dread. We fully expected to be facing the end of the world. Margaret Thatcher had been elected; Russia invaded Afghanistan; Reagan announced he was running for president. We needed someone with a big presence, a big story, and there was Marianne Faithfull.
‘Gina at Bruce’s dinner party, NYC’ (1991) In the retrospective currently on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass cube in Berlin, six of Nan Goldin’s works are displayed . . .
On the morning of 18 April 2023, the chess grandmaster Ding Liren, the highest-rated Chinese player of all time, was discussing tactics with his coach. He was due to play game 7 of his world championship . . .
In 2004, Compton Verney, the Warwickshire seat of the Verney family for nearly six hundred years, opened to the public as an art gallery. British portraits, in a variety of media, are central to the . . .
Iwish I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden . . .
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.
Stanford was among the first composers in Britain to write church music that was not automatically relegated to the background; and it was Stanford who, through being professor of music at both Cambridge...
The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical...
Despite the importance of the architectural meaning of the film’s title, the other meaning, the wrong meaning, is also intimately everywhere, and Brady Corbet does tempt us to believe that nothing and...
It's largely thanks to Loach's example that social realism remains a potent and versatile cultural resource for young filmmakers with something to say about working-class experience in Britain here and...
Can the art of political photomontage continue to function as print declines and memes both crude and ingenious proliferate?
Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick...
Abba became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations...
Hew Locke asks us to consider imperial power as a grim yet alluring excess of the symbolic, not just as the exercise of brute force. The proliferating connections – from object to object and among the...
Nicola L.’s functional objects ratchet up the intensity: her soft sculptures are laced with menace. A tugged-open drawer for a vagina, a grasped nipple for a handle: this is the female body served up...
Why do architecture and furniture of a century ago still look new, while clothes, cars and even people appear so dated? How did modern design – clean lines, white walls, geometric volumes, open plans,...
In no sense was Frank Auerbach a topographical artist. Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent and the entrance to his studio were his only external frames of reference from the 1960s. Auerbach’s London...
The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing intervention. Both of these bear an at...
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
The first hour of Anora, Sean Baker says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if we are ready to reconsider the meanings of romance and comedy.
Before William Larkin’s identity was established and his oeuvre began to be reconstructed, paintings such as those in the Suffolk Collection were often referred to as “carpet and curtain pictures”...
The tone of the Glasgow School of Art has been one of victimhood, as if the fires were disasters for which the school itself had no responsibility. This, combined with its seeming indifference to the effect...
Soutine straddles a great generational and stylistic gulf in art history, between the cosy 1900s of Post-Impressionist Montmartre and the drip of Pollock, the shock of Bacon, the organic tubular forms...
‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic...
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