Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that wouldContinue reading “Frank Bowling”
Category Archives: Art
Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness
He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popularContinue reading “Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness”
Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”
Courtney Love
Essay · Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and whoContinue reading “Courtney Love”
The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival
She spent seventy years making art about her childhood. She became famous at seventy-one. She worked until the day she died at ninety-eight. Louise Bourgeois was not the most famous artist of the twentieth century, but she may have been the bravest — and the most honest about what art is actually for. By BergotteContinue reading “The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival”
The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America
America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and AmericanContinue reading “The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America”
The Ten Paintings That Capture the Soul of America
America has often explained itself through words: declarations, amendments, sermons, speeches, songs, campaign slogans, courtroom arguments, advertising copy. But its deeper truths have often appeared first as images. Paintings, unlike political speeches, do not have to pretend to resolve contradiction. They can hold opposites in the same frame: liberty and violence, innocence and denial, lonelinessContinue reading “The Ten Paintings That Capture the Soul of America”
The Fire This Time: John Coltrane and the Music That Changed Everything
He played saxophone with the intensity of a man trying to resolve, through sound alone, questions that language could not reach. He was thirty years old before anyone noticed. He was forty when he died. In between, he remade jazz so completely that the music has never fully recovered — or needed to. There isContinue reading “The Fire This Time: John Coltrane and the Music That Changed Everything”
The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently
They remade British culture, reinvented the novel, revolutionised art criticism, and painted every available surface of a Sussex farmhouse in colours that the English countryside had never previously entertained. A century later, the Bloomsbury Group remains the most argued-about, most imitated, and most misunderstood intellectual community in English literary history. By Bergotte There is aContinue reading “The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently”
Phil Spector
Essay · Music & Culture The Sound He Built and the Silence It Left Phil Spector invented one of the most ravishing sonic experiences in the history of recorded music and then, across the following decades, dismantled every reason to enjoy it cleanly. The Wall of Sound remains. So does everything else. By Bergotte · LosContinue reading “Phil Spector”
My World of Interiors 