Collection
Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.
Arts & Culture
Eva Hesse
Anne Wagner
30 July 2020
The idea of negation was central to the tensions Eva Hesse created and mediated in her sculptures. One of her favourite descriptions of them was ‘chaos structured as non-chaos’: it captures the distinctive look of her work and its commitment to disruptive repetition.
On Dorothea Lange
Joanna Biggs
16 July 2020
‘I would like to be able to photograph constantly, every hour, every conscious hour,’ Dorothea Lange told an interviewer in 1963, two years before she died. There had always been constraints . . .
Tippett’s Knack
Philip Clark
16 July 2020
By the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British . . .
Steve McQueen
Colin Grant
16 July 2020
Steve McQueen trained as a painter before turning to video art. His early films were silent, monochrome, focusing on his own body because it was cheaper than hiring an actor. Many of the works in . . .
Paid to Race
Jon Day
16 July 2020
Since 1961 more people have gone into space than have raced in Formula 1 Grand Prix. This doesn’t mean that it’s harder to become an F1 driver than an astronaut. But motorsport is incredibly . . .
Picasso and Tragedy
T.J. Clark, 16 August 2017
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.
Swoonatra
Ian Penman, 1 July 2015
Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.
Is Wagner bad for us?
Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013
Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
At the End of My Pencil
Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009
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.
Kiarostami et Compagnie
Gilberto Perez, 27 June 2002
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.
Conversations with Don Luis
Michael Wood, 7 September 2000
‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...
Noovs’ hoovs in the trough
Angela Carter, 24 January 1985
‘Be modern – worship food,’ exhorts the cover of The Official Foodie Handbook. One of the ironies resulting from the North/South dichotomy of our planet is the appearance of this...
The Raphael Question
Lawrence Gowing, 15 March 1984
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...
Dressing and Undressing
Anita Brookner, 15 April 1982
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...
Collections
Read More
Collection
Writing about fashion by Angela Carter, Rosemary Hill, E.S. Turner, Elaine Showalter, John Harvey and Alice Spawls.
Podcasts & Videos
Video
Fritz Lang’s Use of Sound
Michael Wood, 5 April 2017
5 April 2017
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Video
The letters of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau
Nicholas Penny, 29 September 2016
29 September 2016
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
Podcast
The State of Dress
Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Hill, Joanna Biggs and Tom Crewe, 28 July 2020
2 October 2019
Mary-Kay Wilmers and Rosemary Hill join Joanna Biggs and Tom Crewe to talk about the state of our clothes.
More Arts & Culture in the LRB
At the Type Archive
Alice Spawls, 2 July 2020
The casting machine is a clattering, chattering steampunk fantasy, but it’s also incredibly refined. It contains more than four thousand parts, creates four inches of text in less than a minute and...
Charlot v. Hulot: Tativille
David Trotter, 2 July 2020
Charlot, a compound of abstractions, had always been the anvil on which Chaplin could beat out allegory whenever he needed to. Hulot, by contrast, became less and less distinct as Jacques Tati’s...
At the Movies: ‘Da 5 Bloods’
Michael Wood, 2 July 2020
Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (on Netflix) is an extraordinary mixture: a swashbuckling pirate movie about buried gold and a shoot ’em up Western mysteriously transplanted to the East....
Diary: How to Draw an Albatross
Gaby Wood, 18 June 2020
When my plate was processed and printed – a chemical bite into metal; a slow rotating wipe of blackened scrim; a heavy roll of the printing press – the effect, at least to my eyes, was of an...
At the National Gallery: Nicolaes Maes
Clare Bucknell, 18 June 2020
How would a child know that Jesus was a special kind of adult? In early modern depictions of Christ blessing little children, it’s conventional for even the smallest babies to be aware...
On the Pitch
Ben Walker, 18 June 2020
‘The people’s game without the people,’ the football commentator Peter Drury said on 12 March, introducing BT Sport’s coverage of the Europa League fixture between...
At the Movies: ‘Arkansas’
Michael Wood, 4 June 2020
Many new films have deferred release dates, and cinemas keep reminding us to watch at home the films they can’t show. ‘The olden days,’ Anthony Lane said in a recent, very...
At Auckland Castle: Francisco de Zurbarán
Nicola Jennings, 4 June 2020
When in 2010 a group of Old Testament paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán were offered for private sale it came as something of a surprise. The owner couldn’t be blamed for failing...
At Las Pozas: Edward James’s Sculpture Garden
Mike Jay, 21 May 2020
Edward James was filmed in the late 1970s, striding round Las Pozas in a sweater and a tattered dressing-gown, surmounted by parrots. When asked what motivated him, he replied: ‘Pure megalomania!’
Archigram’s Ghost
Jonathan Meades, 21 May 2020
Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big...
Short Cuts: Internet Speak
Lauren Oyler, 7 May 2020
The tone of my correspondence veers from ebullient to combative to conspiratorial to semi-ironically frustrated, outraged, mournful. A message that follows spelling and grammar conventions is rare; it’s...
‘Linderism’
Brian Dillon, 7 May 2020
On 5 November 1982, the post-punk group Ludus played a gig at the Haçienda, the Manchester club run by Factory Records and best known today for its association with New Order and the...
At the Movies: Buster Keaton’s Last Great Film
Michael Wood, 7 May 2020
Asmartly dressed man, wearing suit, tie and hat in the 1920s fashion, walks towards us along a New York street, accompanied by a stylish woman. Suddenly, he is flat on his back. He gets up,...
At the Royal Academy: Léon Spilliaert
John-Paul Stonard, 16 April 2020
Léon Spilliaert's ghostly works seem to have more in common with Chinese ink painting than with the art of fin-de-siècle Belgium. There is life in the ordinary objects Spilliaert paints –...
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