CRIME HAS ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR. In George Orwell’s essay Decline of the English Murder (1946) he pictures a chap on a Sunday afternoon. ‘The wife is already asleep in the armchair… You put your feet up on the sofa and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire… have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the fire is well alight… In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read Read More
JOAN MIRÓ (1893-1983) was a contradiction: a bohemian in attitude but who dressed as a businessman at the easel; taciturn and sober, he belied his playful artistic style, his rejection of the commercial. He was ‘utterly free of disorder or excess’ said a friend. Miró was a quiet iconoclast, contemptuous of much conventional painting. By upsetting the visual elements in art he declared an ‘assassination of painting’. He loathed any surrender to the diktats of dealers. He was distressed by Read More
ANYTHING GOES A brief history of the musical ‘No legs, no jokes, no chance!’ The famous quote was plain wrong. The show in question – the 1943 pre-Broadway premiere of Away We Go – was a strange subject for an entertainment: a story about feuding cattlemen and farmers out West in 1906, that includes a gruesome killing. Such violence was not the stuff of the usual froth (London’s theatreland was once called ‘an asylum for American inanity’). When it opened Read More
The Golden Age of VENETIAN PAINTING VENICE was ‘this strange dream upon the water’ to Dickens. Petrarch called it ‘another world.’ The more cynical Thomas Mann said it was ‘half fairytale and half tourist trap’. Refugees, escaping from the barbarians in the 5th century, established a city on numerous small islands in the Lagoon, with canals as arteries and the sea as defence. The relics of St. Mark were smuggled to Venice in the 9th century, a prestigious shrine (second Read More
‘A painter’s mind must always aim at the sublime, the heroic and for perfection.’ So said Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770). He is the master of the Grand Manner. He may have lived in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, but his art is pure theatre. There is nothing rational about it, nothing worldly. His paintings are poetic masterpieces of colour: sensual, magical. Caravaggio’s martyr or saint looks like the bloke next door; Tiepolo gives him the majesty of the heavens. Read More
Modigliani said to me time and again that he wanted a short but intense life. Jacques Lipchitz, 1954 AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (1884-1920) got his wish. He died of tuberculosis, aged 35, in Paris. But his health was shattered by drink and drugs. Yet in that ‘short but intense life’ he created sculptures and figurative paintings of classical beauty. His life was almost a caricature of the bohemian artist in novels and opera: consumptive, subversive, poetic (‘I never met a painter who Read More
Édouard Manet saw the paintings by Velázquez in the Prado and was awed. ‘He is the painter of painters,’ he wrote, ‘he has astonished me, he has ravished me.’ You can feel what Manet felt if you go to Rome’s Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. In a small room are two masterpieces, both created around 1650: one a sculpted bust by Bernini; the other a painting by Velázquez (while on his second visit to Rome). They are of Pope Innocent X. Their Read More
RAPHAEL (1483-1520), so his biographer Vasari tells us, died aged only 37 of too much sex. This unlikely scenario does however tell us something about the man. He was passionate. He was beguiling. The coquettish woman in La Fornarina (his mistress?) holds a bare breast while pointing at an armband bearing his name, as if she belonged to Raphael. Her sidelong eyes seem to share a joke. Unlike his tormented rivals, Michelangelo and Leonardo, he had no repressed or unrepressed Read More
RENÉ MAGRITTE (1898-1967) was born in Belgium. His father was a tailor. His mother drowned herself when René was 13. She was found with her dress covering her face, which may have inspired Magritte’s paintings of faces obscured by cloth. He studied art at the Academy in Brussels, which he found dull. His early works were often of female nudes, influenced by Futurism. In 1922 Magritte married his childhood friend Georgette Berger (they never had children). He needed work so Read More
MICHELANGELO was 17 when a fellow student (‘a bestial and arrogant man’) punched him on the nose and broke it. It was a permanent disfigurement that this celebrant of male beauty felt keenly. Anger burned throughout his life. One papal patron, Leo X, dithered over commissioning the great artist: ‘But he is terribile; one cannot deal with him.’ Yet it was his terribilità, his ability to instil awe, terror or a sense of the sublime, that led contemporaries to call Read More