Reviews of art, culture and literature
With pleasure and trepidation, I introduce you to my new book How to Start a Dissident Art Movement. As part of the re-thinking of the core principles I need to honour, I made a decisive break when I composed this book. I decided to move away from the disembodied advocacy of previous books and reviews, towards something [ ]
Often, when we think of Romanticism, we think of a liberated imagination but a very constricted veristic technique. Even the mistiness of the mountains of Friedrich are precise in their softness and ambiguity – it is distilled and calculated. The arid plains of Dalí’s Ampurda and the gently graded skies above have the same exactitude. [ ]
It was mid-winter when I arrived in Berlin. I had a suitcase and an English-language teaching diploma. I found an unfurnished room in a top-floor flat in Kreuzberg near the Landwehrkanal. I had a mattress but no bed. I borrowed a desk and garden chair. I spent €20 on a portable Olympia typewriter and began [ ]
I am delighted to announce the publication of my debut novel. The Naked Spur (Exeter House, 2025, pb, £15.99) follows the life of a painter in London slipping into failure and anonymity. He rejects the art world and begins to paint humanity s darkest corners, unwittingly revealing his own. He quits his job. He stakes everything [ ]
On the evening of 28 May 2025 I shall be appearing in London to discuss my experience of leaving the London art scene in 2003 and my first novel “The Naked Spur”, written about that event. The novel will be published on 23 May. There will be copies of the novel for sale on the [ ]
In this new volume of Francis Bacon Studies series there is a collection of new material covering the artists life, including an introduction to a friend who became the subject of a 1969 painting and discussion of the nature of forgery (including a photograph of a fake Bacon produced in Italy in the early 1970s). [ ]
It is curious that perhaps the world’s leading Romantic artist is also the best living printmaker. Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) is a Leipzig-based printmaker who has been exploring the world through heavily processed imagery, both of urban environments and nature. Baumgartner’s current solo exhibition is Sunken Treasure (Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 30 January-8 March 2025) [ ]
Studying the early period of an artist can be rewarding. It satisfies our desire to tie together strands and clues and discern how the artist’s originality manifested itself in preliminary concerns and exposure to identified influences. Two books attempt to explain who Swiss artist Hansruedi Giger (1940-2014) was before he made his iconic designs for [ ]
[Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) (1973), oil on canvas, first version left, final version right; (c) 2024 Estate of Francis Bacon] I Out of the approximately 5,000 books on fine art I have read over the last 35 years, Francis Bacon: Revisions has to be perhaps the most compelling [ ]
Since 1988, I have seen plenty of exhibitions of Surrealist art, perhaps more than the curators of “Imagine: 100 Years of Surrealism” (21 February-21 July 2024, Royal Museums of Fine Art, Brussels). Every time the subject comes up in an exhibition schedule, I experience weariness tempered by anticipation at the chance to see iconic works. [ ]