The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick...
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine...
Damaged, unfinished or fragmented works have an appeal of their own (Renaissance artists sometimes deliberately sought this ‘non finito’) and are also prized for what they can teach us about an artist’s...
For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about...
Coward absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated them. Patriotic, enthusiastic about the Empire, mistrustful of intellectualism and...
Fassbinder predicted a world of ubiquitous screens. He was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d...
Unlike Kathryn Scanlan’s short stories, which dispense with context and explication, Kick the Latch is precisely detailed. Her character, Sonia, describes the importance of X-raying horses’ hooves...
Fashions change, but monarchical regalia tends towards ossification: Charles III and Camilla left their coronation this year swathed in robes of ermine-trimmed purple, just as George III and his queen...
The story of artists’ studios intersects with the history of real estate, just as it shadows the expansion of other ‘curated’ spaces in late capitalism. Today hairdressers, potters, nail technicians,...
Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin...
The idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through work or taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is...
Could pottery be art? Should a teapot pour? Lucie Rie had no truck with this. When asked about theoretical or critical questions she would answer with crisp finality: ‘I make pots. It is my profession.’
As Mia Hansen-Løve’s style and interests suggest, any narrative solution is one option among several. That is the force of the other meaning of the film’s title: not hoping against hope, or believing...
California’s first gold rush was in 1848; its second was Hollywood. Between 1910 and 1925, film industry grosses went from $10 million to $800 million. There were jobs and spondulix galore. Hollywood...
Mária Bartuszová made around five hundred sculptures, her productivity aided by her preferred material, plaster. The great majority of her works are plaster casts – and not just any sort. Plaster has...
The story South Korea likes to tell about itself is ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, in which a country rises from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a stylish economic success story. The story...
Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature,...
French moralists are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of...