Dick French May/June 2020 It’s interesting to read the letters of John Ruskin alongside those of Vincent van Gogh. Most people are aware that Ruskin became rather unbalanced with age, but from reading his correspondence with Euphemia (Effie) it seems to me he was quite mad from the start. It’s the manic density that impresses as much as the content. […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2020 At the exit to Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition, the gift shop tills were barricaded behind an airport queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press view on 10 March. “We’re prepared for anything,” he replied. What they weren’t prepared for was nothing, which – […]

Dick French March/April 2020 Who now remembers the fashion for wearing two pairs of trousers? It was all the rage in Camden Town twenty years ago but you seldom see it now. The outer pair would be cut at the knee to reveal the underlying pair. There’s one chap on Queen’s Crescent who carries on the tradition. Apart from the […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party: “I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?” James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start: Are y’all experienced?” “Yeah!” roars the crowd, unleashing a 10-minute guitar […]

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2019 In October of last year, under the title ‘The Midas Touch’, Sotheby’s held a special sale of ‘objets de vertu’ made of gold. “In a world that speaks 6,900 languages,” cooed the catalogue, “the language of gold remains universal”. To prove it, the auction house promised to take collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: “Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician” and remarking in surprise: “What, both in the same grave?”  I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic Saïd, a contributor to Boris […]

Laura Gascoigne July/August 2019 It’s hard to know where to start with Ingres’s definition when nobody knows any more what probity means. And yet drawing is enjoying a resurgence. What is going on? When David Hockney breezed into the Royal College from Bradford in 1959, he announced his arrival not with naïve etchings of naughty gay boys but with a […]

Advocating life drawing at art school is a deeply conservative and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of two camps (or sometimes both). I am utterly unconvinced by both. The first, and weaker, argument contends that it is necessary to learn the rules before you can break them. This is an authoritarian position where […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2019 In 2014 the Harvard-based science magazine Annals of Improbable Research presented its Ig Nobel prize for neuroscience to a team of researchers from China and Canada who demonstrated that seeing the face of Christ in a slice of burnt toast is perfectly OK. (That year’s Ig Nobel prize for economics went to the Italian government for […]