On the Beauty of an Unfinished Painting
Cezanne's The Large Bathers, housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows patches of bare canvas between its monumental figures.
James Alderton · 2024-11-04
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 21–40 of 168 articles
The Novelists Who Write One Sentence a Day
James Joyce reportedly spent an entire day working on two sentences of Ulysses.
Marcus Wei · 2024-11-04
The Art Dealers Who Bet on Unknown Painters
In 1905, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opened a tiny gallery on Rue Vignon in Paris and began buying paintings by an unknown Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-11-03
How Gordon Parks Used a Camera as a Weapon Against Injustice
In 1942, Gordon Parks was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship and arrived at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.
Catherine Avery · 2024-11-03
The Forgotten Female Composers of the Romantic Era
In 1846, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel composed a piano cycle called Das Jahr, assigning each month a character piece of remarkable harmonic invention.
James Alderton · 2024-11-02
Why Every City Needs a Cinema That Shows Old Films
The Metrograph on Ludlow Street in Manhattan opened in 2016 with a 35mm print of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-11-02
The Photographers Who Shoot Only in Black and White, Still
Sebastiao Salgado spent six years photographing the world's last untouched ecosystems for his project Genesis, and he shot every frame in black and white.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-11-01
Montaigne's Essays and the Invention of Thinking Out Loud
In 1571, Michel de Montaigne retired to a tower library in his family chateau in the Dordogne, inscribed Greek and Latin maxims on the ceiling beams, and began writing what he called essais: attempts, trials, experiments in thought.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-11-01
On the Moral Weight of Comedy
When Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1964, the prosecution argued that his language was indecent.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-31
How Dieter Rams Designed Calm Into Everyday Objects
In 1961, Dieter Rams designed the T 1000 world receiver radio for Braun.
James Alderton · 2024-10-31
What Magic Realism Offers the Practical Man
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once described magic realism not as fantasy but as an enlargement of reality.
William Ashford · 2024-10-30
The Architecture of Concert Halls and Why It Matters to Every Note
When the Berliner Philharmonie opened in 1963, its vineyard-style seating arrangement, designed by Hans Scharoun, placed the orchestra at the centre of the audience rather than at one end.
William Ashford · 2024-10-30
How the Blues Travelled from Mississippi to Manchester
In 1962, a young Mick Jagger clutched a collection of Chess Records imports on a train platform in Dartford, England, and struck up a conversation with Keith Richards about Muddy Waters.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-29
The Ceramic Artists Working in Cathedral-Sized Kilns
In the hills of Shigaraki, Japan, anagama kilns stretch up to twenty metres long, their brick chambers shaped like tunnels carved into the hillside.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-29
Why the Piano Bar Refuses to Die
The piano bar — that stubbornly analogue institution where a musician plays requests for a room of strangers who may or may not sing along — has survived the death of the cocktail lounge, the rise and fall of the nightclub, the karaoke revolution, and the pandemic.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-28
On the Pleasures of Reading Biographies of People You Dislike
Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a 1,344-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who reshaped New York City through highways, bridges, and parks while destroying neighbourhoods and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents — is riveting precisely because its subject is detestable.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-28
Walter Benjamin and the Flâneur's Guide to Modern Cities
Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project — a vast collection of quotations, observations, and theoretical fragments assembled between 1927 and 1940 — proposed the Parisian arcade as a key to understanding modern capitalism.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-27
The Illustrated Letters That Artists Sent to Their Friends
Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, spanning over eight hundred missives written between 1872 and 1890, constitute one of the most extraordinary documents of artistic development in Western history.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-27
How a Single Chord Progression Shaped Fifty Years of Pop Music
The I-V-vi-IV chord progression — in the key of C, that is C major, G major, A minor, F major — underlies an estimated one-quarter of all pop songs released since 1970.
Marcus Wei · 2024-10-26
The Cinema of Small Gestures: Ozu and Everyday Life
Yasujirō Ozu's films contain almost no dramatic events in the conventional sense.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-26