How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady reads reviews, she tends to ‘scan the first five or six lines, skip to the last two or three, and end up thinking, what’s with these people?’
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It’s clever marketing, really – the notion that creativity comes from the lone genius. It plays into the human fascination with famous names and gives us what we’ve been taught every good story needs: a protagonist.
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Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender to funny to cynical to sinister — the beat goes on uninterrupted.
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Light and dark are threaded throughout this spellbinding and sometimes scary exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant final two decades of Louise Bourgeois' long career.
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The first thing you see upon entering ‘Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art’, a striking new exhibition at Two Temple Place, is Ladi Kwali and Kiln, a black-and-white photograph taken in the early 1960s.
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Laura Knight was still in her teens when she first flouted convention. Banned from drawing nudes at art school because she was a woman, she hired a private model to pose for her at home.
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Masha looks cold. She’s chalky white with rosy cheeks and a shiny nose. Her lips are gently pressed together, and her eyes are glassy and wet like they’ve been leaking in the wind. She appears not to have any eyebrows, and her eyelashes are barely visible.
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Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts radiate a delicate power. It’s there in the light and airy lavenders and blush pinks, and the deep blues and bottle greens that gleam like beetles.
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It’s a fact that the Courtauld has reopened to the public following a three-year, £57m makeover, but I can’t help thinking about fiction.
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When Aya Haidar was ten years old, someone asked her what her mum did for a living. She remembers replying, “Oh, my mum doesn’t do anything, she’s just a mum.” Her dad, who rarely raised his voice, told her he didn’t want to hear her saying that ever again.
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The mostly young women in Clare Sestanovich’s pithy first collection of short stories are drifting, with “nonspecific” jobs, “mild” preferences, and “vague” creative ambition.
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About two-thirds of the way through her engaging new book, Emma Lewis describes the subtle yet significant distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’.
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A woman with dark hair and matching wing-like eyebrows lounges on a bed amid clashing fabrics. She’s casually propped up against a squashy pillow and her ankles are crossed.
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Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church.
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It’s strange for an artist to be defined by a single artwork. It is stranger still if that artist works across a range of media, and is also an author, a teacher, a feminist and an activist.
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There is a myth, writes Alice Hattrick in their new book, Ill Feelings, that to be ill is to hide, “that to be inexplicably ill and dependent on the care and support of others is a choice, a way of getting out of what you don’t want to do, a choice that clever, deceitful young women make for themselves”.
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‘The point is to imagine,’ murmurs Paula, the walleyed protagonist of Maylis de Kerangal’s engaging new novel, Painting Time. She’s talking to Kate, with whom she’s studying the art of trompe-l’œil at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels.
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The first thing that hits me when I see Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms isn’t the scale (monumental) or the palette (psychedelic) but the paint itself. It’s thick, sticky and a little bit nasty.
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‘The interesting thing,’ says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, ‘is that when you use a Lalanne desk, bar or chair, you have to change the way you use a desk, bar or chair.’
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I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’.
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