The British painter and Royal Academician, whose mysterious, richly coloured pictures transformed ordinary human life into scenes of dream, myth and private theatre, has died. Mick Rooney, the British painter whose strange, densely imagined figurative pictures occupied a distinctive place in British art for more than half a century, has died. Born in 1944, RooneyContinue reading “Mick Rooney, 1944–2026: The Painter of the Human Theatre”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture
The German-born American artist, whose ecstatic suns, rainbows, cosmic figures and Day-Glo colours became part of the visual language of the 1960s, has died aged 88. Peter Max, the artist whose brilliant colours, cosmic landscapes and buoyant psychedelic imagery became almost inseparable from the visual culture of the American 1960s, died on 14 September 2026Continue reading “Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture”
Annie Dillard, 1945–2026: The Fierce Attention of a Life
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, whose ecstatic, exacting prose transformed the observation of nature into an inquiry into consciousness, faith and existence, has died aged 81. Annie Dillard, one of the most singular voices in postwar American literature, died on 15 September 2026 at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. SheContinue reading “Annie Dillard, 1945–2026: The Fierce Attention of a Life”
In Memoriam – Bob Mackie
The Sultan of Sequins Bob Mackie, who died on 14 September 2026 at the age of eighty-seven, dressed the century’s most luminous performers in the most theatrical clothes ever made for a body. He understood, better than almost anyone in the history of costume, that a great dress was not decoration but transformation — thatContinue reading “In Memoriam – Bob Mackie”
The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
By Bergotte Rainer Werner Fassbinder made forty-four films in sixteen years, and then he died at thirty-seven of a drug overdose in a Munich flat in 1982, and the output is so staggering and the life so short that the mathematics alone feel like an argument — an argument that something was burning in thisContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder”
The New Dark Ages
What We Lose When We Stop Reading Book: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate SocietyAuthor: James MarriottPublisher: The Bodley HeadPublication: 3 September 2026Pages: 208ISBN: 9781847929518Genre: Cultural criticism / Social commentary / Media studies There is something almost quaint about worrying about the death of reading. We haveContinue reading “The New Dark Ages”
The Life of Somebody Else
Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the Ethical Problem of Autofiction Rachel Cusk’s Life of M has produced one of the strangest literary controversies of the year. Its famous actress is fictional, yet recognisably assembled from details belonging to Natalie Portman. The resulting argument is larger than celebrity gossip: it asks who owns a life, whatContinue reading “The Life of Somebody Else”
The Human Condition According to Henry James
By Bergotte Henry James believed that consciousness was the most important thing in the world. Not action, not achievement, not the accumulation of experience in the traveller’s sense — the places visited, the people met, the events survived — but the quality of attention brought to experience, the precision and depth with which a mindContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Henry James”
John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin
The cancelled Metropolitan Museum retrospective has reopened one of fashion’s most difficult questions: what should history do with an artist whose creative achievement is inseparable from an act of profound disgrace? By Bergotte The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not merely cancel an exhibition when it abandoned John Galliano: Horizons, the major retrospective that hadContinue reading “John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin”
Villa Nava by Francesco Castiglioni
Francesco Castiglioni made that declaration. The house he designed in the early 1970s on Via Ippocastani — known as Villa Nava, a building that has been featured in the international architectural and design press with the consistency that attaches to buildings of genuine formal intelligence — is not a house that apologises for what it is or attempts to negotiate a compromise with its context. It is simply, and entirely, itself…
My World of Interiors 