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.
Richard Wright considered Paris a ‘city of refuge’. The city served as both sanctuary and training ground for some of America’s most important post-war black visual artists – artists whose auction sales remained quite modest, until the George Floyd protests led previously indifferent collectors to ‘discover’ black modernism.
The sculptor Richard Hunt was nineteen years old when he looked into Emmett Till’s casket. It was September 1955. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had called on mourners to witness and grieve for . . .
There are, of course, the huddled masses, nameless, deprived of family, possessions, hope, dignity, wrapped in ragged blankets of despair, worn and punished for their very existence. And then there . . .
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to . . .
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.
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.
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.
Claire Denis and J. Hoberman join Adam Shatz to talk about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and granted independence to Congo in 1960. Whatever it was called, it was a place where...
To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance...
‘I wanted to understand the figure of Riefenstahl in her development,’ Andres Veiel says, ‘without exculpating her in the process. Wanting to understand a person is not the same as looking at them...
Sienese painters adopted forms so distinct from those of their better-known Florentine neighbours that their work was not always appreciated for its idiosyncratic qualities. There is no single-point perspective,...
A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...
Terrence Malick is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...
Victor Hugo was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...
Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...
Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers...
Noah Davis’s work is distinguished by a revelry and a commitment to the figures he brings into his image world. There are few non-Black subjects here. That in itself was a political choice, as well as...
‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the...
I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency...
We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time. The apparent...
Alasdair Gray’s illustrations tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of...
Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave...
Insofar as Dora Carrington has had a wider reputation, it has rested chiefly on her landscapes. In 2014, Farm at Watendlath (1921) came second in a poll to find the most popular works in British museums....
While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead:...
Picasso’s perpetual object is the human body, which is everywhere remodelled, schematised and simplified, rendered breathtakingly beautiful one moment and grotesquely ugly the next, and always treated...
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