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.
Marie D’Aguanno Ito compares Orsanmichele market to Wall Street. It had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day was even marked by the ringing of a bell. But the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t have an image of the Virgin Mary painted on the wall. The painting in Orsanmichele appeared overnight, out of nowhere, shortly after construction finished in 1290.
At his final White House Correspondents’ dinner, Barack Obama joked that he had been grizzled by the presidency while Michelle had barely aged a day. ‘She looks so happy to be here … That’s . . .
In the summer of 2024, Donald Trump played a round of golf at Bedminster, a course he owns in New Jersey, in the company of Bryson DeChambeau, twice winner of the US Open. The ostensible aim was to . . .
In the early 1970s, the Scottish artist Rory McEwen painted several pieces he called True Facts from Nature. Like most of his work they are botanical subjects, sharply painted in watercolour on vellum . . .
Le Festival de Cannes was inaugurated in 1939 to coincide with – and compete with – the Venice Film Festival. The previous year, Leni Riefenstahl had been awarded the Mussolini Cup for Olympia . . .
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.
Claire Denis and J. Hoberman join Adam Shatz to talk about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
Ryan Coogler’s horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for...
Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement...
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...
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...
During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible to...
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...
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