Rye Dag Holmboe

‘Angora Cat’ (1937-39)

In​ 1939, the American collector Sidney Janis was asked to curate a show of work by unknown artists for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He visited the Hudson Walker Gallery on 57th Street, but found nothing he wanted to include. On his way out, however, he noticed two paintings turned to face the wall. The gallery owner explained that they were...

In​ 1942, walking the streets of wartime Bucharest, 17-year-old Isidore Isou posed himself the same question then being asked of the founding of Israel: how to build a better world than the one around him? The answer came to him as an illumination – or perhaps as mania. ‘All must be revealed in letters.’ Words had, he thought, done great damage throughout history. By...

Each​ time I walk into Howard Hodgkin’s studio it takes a few seconds for my eyes to get used to the light. The white walls and translucent glass ceiling give the studio the same ‘glancing, slightly dematerialised’ quality Hodgkin said he sought in his paintings. In an interview a few years before his death in 2017, he described the light in the studio as like an envelope....