Peggy Guggenheim
The Life of an Art Addict (Anton Gill) (2002) Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland) She was the Art Groupie par excellence, with more passion and panache than learning or taste, but she brought work to the attention of her rich friends and thereby both sustained talent and helped corrupt the art market. Gill’s work is like a non-fiction Apes of God: bitchy, knowing and a huge laugh. Ms Vreeland, in presenting an essentially linear, coherent, and interesting documentary, has unearthed some biographical material taped in the late 1970s (the subject died in 1979) and padded it nicely with film,…
Continue Reading →Everything is Happening
(by Michael Jacobs, with an introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy) (2015) Diego Velázquez (Summer 1599 – 6 August 1660), one of Spain’s greatest painters, created Las Meninas (“The Ladies in Waiting” or “Maids of Honour”) in 1656. A large work, a masterpiece of High Baroque, it seems to be the painter casting his patrons (King Philip IV and Queen Mariana) as a camera, they surveying the room in which Diego is painting them, with its royal domestic scene. With brilliant use of light and shade, peerless brushwork and tasteful use of colour, Velázquez provides a series of highlights that float around the…
Continue Reading →Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
(By Elvis Costello) (2015) We’ve been admiring EC from afar and occasionally up close, for a very long time. So we come to his autobiography with relish and trepidation. It is not as good as Speak Memory, the greatest autobiography ever penned, but it is hugely impressive – more a dense memory-book than a straight auto-biog, and much more concerned with music and music people than his own ego. He is obviously and rather charmingly challenged by autobiography, preferring the more oblique method of song lyrics and anecdotes, and saying of the process: “I don’t much care for the subject.”…
Continue Reading →Gaudí
(Biography by Gijs van Hensbergen) (2001) Before the New Brutalism (described as the ‘Screw You Style of Architecture”), there was Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) who dazzled the world with his innovative, modern, rococo buildings in Catalonia and Barcelona. Le Corbusier recognised his daring and complex designs, so it is a pity he declined to follow his example. His simple grandeur evokes late mannerism, coupled with swirls and rounded features that return to classicism as well as recalling some Moorish structures. Who else could have designed the Arcadia-meets-Disneyland that is the Park Güell? (see above and below). He said that…
Continue Reading →The Varnished Index
A Aboriginal Art Accident The Adelaide Ring The Adventures of Robin Hood The Aeneid Affliction Agincourt Aida Alexander Hamilton Alexandra’s Project Alexandros of Antioch All About Eve All Must Fall All My Sons All the President’s Men American Visions Anaesthesia An American Melodrama Andrei Rublev Animal Crossing – 3DS Animal Farm Annabel Lee Annabel Lee, Miranda and Stevie Anna Karenina The Apartment The Apes of God Argo Ariadne and Theseus The Aristocrats Art Joke of the Week Asoka As We Like Them The Athaneum Library Atlantic City Attlee Avida Dollars B The Babadook Badlands The Ballad of the “Angry Penguin”…
Continue Reading →