Right up until her death in 1992 Mitchell remained committed to what she liked to call ‘AEOH’ – Abstract Expressionist Old Hat. The recent retrospective of her work, on view in Paris...
Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion of movement – were a wonder whose spell was cast by speed; and speed was what the slapstick cinematic chase both celebrated...
The myth of Delius’s individualism may once have been a useful way of understanding his music. Positioning him as a man outside of his time, uninterested in and unanswerable to his surroundings,...
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two...
I ngmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little...
George Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna. In Freedom Uncut, Liam Gallagher describes...
I n 1768, Josiah Wedgwood’s accountant reported an extraordinary event in his regular letter to the firm’s London offices. Among the details of invoices and updates on recent...
Winslow Homer insisted that the subject of The Gulf Stream is ‘comprised in its title’, as if the man on the boat surrounded by sharks were indistinguishable from the great current and from...
Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
T he death early in 1603 of Maria of Austria, daughter of Charles V, wife of Maximilian II and mother of Rudolf II, called for extravagant exequies. Her catafalque, erected in the monastery of...
Fashion magazines were supposed to be aspirational, concerned not with reality but a dream. And the dream echoed the culture, which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich,...
Among the shadows and gleaming surfaces are the workers, concentrating fixedly. There are no types or archetypes in Chris Killip’s photographs, only the singular iteration of faces and bodies.
The pictures suggest a before and after: the subjects are on their way somewhere. Their clothes tell us something about trends – which continued to be imported as well as self-generated –...
T.J. Clark’s definition of modernism draws on an old-school idea of modernity: Max Weber on ‘the disenchantment’ of a rationalised world, Georg Simmel on the ‘indifference’...
When the Daily Mail launched in 1896 it boasted that, unlike its rivals, it did not carry a page of verbatim parliamentary reports. Instead, there were women’s pages, daily features, and ‘talking...
T he unlived life is a great modern theme. Not reality’s disappointments, but reality itself as a form of evasion, the wrong road taken. When we read or hear the word...
There is no way to offset the fact that a gigantic dose of hydrocarbon wealth is being used to stage an immensely carbon-intensive spectacle, in a place that is already getting hotter faster than almost...
Carolee Schneemann worked at a remove from the central debates of 20th-century feminism – making sex films twenty years before the sex wars, kissing cats before the turn to the non-human –...