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...
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...
The loosening up of Freud’s painting occurred while his second marriage was breaking up. He would never marry again. He needed to free himself from emotional ties and, at the same time, he wanted...
Arthur Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He made music for every possible mood: something to play during the snoozy afternoon, a 12-inch to light up the...
Early in her career Simone Biles was described in ways that made clear that she wasn’t the shape of the supposed ideal gymnast; she was always ‘powerful’ or ‘muscular’....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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....
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...
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?
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.