Despite insisting that her magnified flower paintings (c.1924–50s) were not expressions of female sexuality, Georgia O’Keeffe endured Freudian readings of her work by male critics throughout her career.
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When Heather Phillipson was invited to fill Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, the artist behind the spoiled swirl of whipped cream on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth felt simultaneously daunted and excited.
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As museums in England reopen their doors to the public this month, it is fitting that the Hepworth Wakefield—which celebrates its tenth anniversary on 21 May—is doing so with a major exhibition of Barbara Hepworth, an artist for whom physical encounters with art were so vital.
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There's something hopeful about Rana Begum's art. The way painting, sculpture and installation shift and morph. The soft pastel colours and the subtle gleam of light.
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After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and began writing in Italian. Her new novel — a slim and bewitching tale of a woman at her midpoint — she wrote first in Italian and has since translated.
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Auctioneer Stéphane Aubert rolls up on his Vespa at the entrance to an enormous storage space in the industrial no-man’s-land northwest of Paris. He’s sharply dressed in a shirt and tie, his navy pinstripe suit is crease-free and his black brogues are polished to a shine. He slips off his helmet and smiles.
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Jessie Greengrass’s absorbing debut novel, Sight, began with an unnamed narrator telling us she was pregnant and ended with her giving birth. In her even more absorbing second novel, The High House, we find ourselves once again waiting for waters to break, although in this case it is the waves that rise and roil.
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Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences.
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It takes confidence to write about something as undramatic as the postal service – a confidence that struts across the page in Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent novel to appear in English.
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In the autumn of 1977, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and his partner, fellow artist Brian Buczak, gave the painter Alice Neel a lift back into New York City from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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“It felt like the right thing for me to do,” says Sungi Mlengeya, when I ask what made her want to paint the women around her. “I’m most inspired by my fellow women and I’m one of them.”
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“Why have there been no great women artists?” It is a silly question, really, and the art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) certainly thought so when a male gallerist put it to her.
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Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future.
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The latest novel by the writer and musician Jenny Hval is a bubbling cauldron of chaos, as surreal and skewed as her debut, Paradise Rot.
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The list was long and hand-written, spidery in black ink. It was structured by shop, the name of each underlined and followed by the shopkeeper’s name in brackets. It had a neat tear along one side and a doe-eyed donkey wearing a bulky saddle bag on the reverse. When my mother handed it over, saddle-side up, I said, ‘You ought to get me one of those.’
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When Rachel Cohen was a child, she tried to etch her future self in her mind. “I hoped, when I grew older, I would be able to somehow come back and revisit this version of myself and tell her what had happened.”
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When Eileen Cooper was a child, her mother used to sit and draw with her in biro on a notepad. “Not that she was ever able to pursue a career in art and I don’t know if she ever had an interest really,” says Eileen, “but I obviously did.”
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A woman wheels towards a large blank canvas. In one hand she brandishes a brush, in the other a palette daubed with paint. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her fine silk dress, the lacy white fringe of her chemise curling over the cuffs.
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Cromwell Place is in good company. Spread across five white, stucco-fronted Victorian townhouses in London’s South Kensington, the new exhibition and co-working space shares a neighbourhood with world-renowned art, design and history institutions.
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Smart collectors follow their taste and inclinations when they’re buying but they also have the nose to expand and explore new fields. We speak to four insiders about where the market is heading – and what sectors are piquing their interest.
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