Zanele Muholi’s black-and-white portraits are as beautiful as they are harrowing.
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The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey.
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When Prudence Flint started to paint women in everyday settings, her work was promptly described as “domestic”. “It’s not a sexy title, is it?” she asks. “It felt confusing because if I put a woman outside she was subject to another limit and scrutiny. So I started to think about dreams and giving myself space in that way.”
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Man Ray was a reluctant photographer. His career behind the camera was cash-driven and he famously claimed that ‘photography is not art’.
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For a curator, coming up with an original proposition for a museum show of an artist as revered and exhibited as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) can be quite the challenge. The solution devised by the curator Aurélie Verdier was to invite audiences to “re-read” the French artist.
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It was spring and I was there to save my marriage. Not by having a baby, as couples have been known to do, but by confirming that my insides were barren. Rob had told me early on that he always imagined his life without children. That’s fine, I remember laughing, I’m not exactly yearning for motherhood. But then I noticed how I was patting my pockets. My keys, my phone, my wallet. I felt all the time like I’d forgotten something.
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I hadn’t heard from my mother for a month. Normally she left a voicemail once a week, informing me of her and Stanley’s whereabouts, occasionally asking how I was and even more occasionally asking after my own husband. Then, all of a sudden, she announced she was in London. Could we meet for breakfast? I wanted to say no, I didn’t have time. I’d love to, I said. Can’t be too picky when you’re one parent down.
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Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals make you stop and think. Not necessarily about what they represent but how you feel. Their brooding veils of colour and blurry outlines draw you in. They’re like windows and doors, portals into another realm, with dusky planes and ragged edges.
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The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’.
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It began with a tweet. Nicole Tersigni was scrolling through Twitter when she stumbled upon a man explaining one of her friend’s jokes back to her – something she’d experienced several times herself – and decided to make a joke of her own.
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About a quarter of the way through Eliza Clark’s debut novel Boy Parts, the protagonist, Irina, describes her ability as a photographer. “I could train a camera on a man and look at him like a man looks at a woman; boys, too, could be objects of desire.”
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There is a confidence that comes from being a part of a larger whole. And yet, group membership invites invidious comparisons: who’s getting it right?
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To some art critics, William Scott's kitchen-table still lifes are too timid – as Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, they can be seen as 'abstract paintings for people who don't like abstraction'. Others, myself included, find them enticingly reduced and for the most part easily readable, which is part of their charm.
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The dedication in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts sets the tone for the tale that follows: “For my mother and father. Please don’t read this.” The novel, a debut by the 26-year-old from Newcastle, will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.
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Stand before a work of art and you're sure to feel something. The recent toppling of monuments associated with slavery and colonialism across Europe and the US is the latest in a long line of more radical reactions.
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As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children.
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Before Covid-19 many museums and galleries had begun to integrate digital platforms, but many more have seen that evolution accelerated by the global health crisis.
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As a major Paris exhibition shows Christian Louboutin’s body of work, we talk to the designer about the benefits of owning your own maison, shifts within the fashion industry and how he keeps his label fresh.
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When I was asked to cover the opening of the Albertina Modern, I thought excitedly of squeezing into my 48 hours in Vienna as many visits to the city’s fabled museums and galleries as I possibly could. As I write this, stuck in my flat in London, the situation has changed somewhat.
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Did you know there’s an Instagram account called Tits from the Past? I didn’t, until my stepdad pointed it out to me, which is OK because my mum pointed it out to him.
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