C O N T E N T S
No. 6214
May 6 2022
the-tls.co.uk
UK £4.50 | USA $8.99
T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T
Susan Owens Eccentric gardeners | Patricia A. Matthew Decoding costume drama Miranda Seymour Elizabeth Lowry’s Hardy | Joe Moran Premonitions of disaster
Portrait of the artist James Fenton on Picasso and his biographer
“Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Woman sitting on a chair)” by Pablo Picasso, 1941 © Henie Onstad Collection, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Photographer: Øystein Thorvaldsen. 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In this issue
The first three volumes of John Richardson’s bio- graphy of Picasso cover the artist’s life until the age of fifty. Richardson died three years ago, before he could complete the fourth, leaving it to his col- laborators, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, to end the narrative in 1943, when Picasso was sixty- one and keeping his head down in Nazi–occupied Paris. The artist still had another thirty years to live. But although his project is incomplete, Richardson’s gossipy but scholarly work looks built to last. The final volume captures the artistic decade in which Picasso painted “Guernica” (1937) and “Night Fish- ing at Antibes” (1939) and, as Richardson put it, “Picassified” a succession of wives and mistresses.
Richardson makes fruitful connections between Picasso’s life and his art: he records the artist’s “maîtresse en titre”, the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, turning to Catholicism after a particularly blue period with the artist, explaining that “After Picasso, there is only God”. James Fenton, the poet, critic and war correspondent, turns the tables on the biographer in his review of Richardson’s Life of Picasso: Volume Four. Fenton detects “a whiff of sulphur” about Richardson, centring on his twelveyear mutually exploitative relationship with Douglas Cooper, a wealthy collector who introduced him to Picasso’s adoring circle.
Richardson’s indiscretions are a gift to art critics. The characters in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics will doubtless inspire many imitators. Prominent among them is Sir Charles Isham, who introduced the gnome to English gardens in the 1860s, inspired by his travels in Germany. Isham populated his Northamptonshire estate with models of fairy miners, but our reviewer Susan Owens suggests he gave them a peculiarly English twist: “a militant group are captured on camera taking strike action in Sir Charles’s rockery”.
Are newspapers failing in invention these days? Sam Knight has written an account of a “Premonitions Bureau” set up in 1966 by the psychiatrist John Barker and Peter Fairley, a science journalist, with the blessing of Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard. “For a year”, writes Joe Moran in his review of the book, “the newspaper’s readers would be asked to send in their forebodings of unwelcome events, which would be collated and then compared with actual events.”
Barker envisaged the Premonitions Bureau as a “central clearing house” for all portents of calamities, “a data bank for the nation’s dreams and visions”. The circumstances that led to the bureau’s closure were likely foreseen, too.
MARTIN IVENS
Editor
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2
3 ART HISTORY
JAMES FENTON
4 HORTICULTURE
6 LETTERS TO THE
EDITOR
SUSAN OWENS
A Life of Picasso – The minotaur years 1933–1943 John Richardson; With the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga. Picasso – Painting the Blue Period (The Philipps Collection, Washington DC). Picasso – Painting the Blue Period Kenneth Brummel and Susan Behrends Frank, editors
English Garden Eccentrics – Three hundred years of extraordinary groves, burrowings, mountains and menageries Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
A history of death, Versions of King Lear, Poets of colour, etc
7 SOCIAL STUDIES
8 BIOGRAPHY
9 POLITICS
11 POEM
12 ECONOMICS
JOE MORAN
DANIEL BEER
JULIUS KREIN ANNE NELSON
JANA PRIKRYL
DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY
The Premonitions Bureau – A true story Sam Knight
Exiles – Three island journeys William Atkins
The Right – The hundred-year war for American conservatism Matthew Continetti The Dying Citizen – How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America Victor Davis Hanson. American Schism – How the two Enlightenments hold the secret to healing our nation Seth David Radwell
New Apartments
Time for Socialism – Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016– 2021 Thomas Piketty. A Brief History of Equality Thomas Piketty
13 RE-READING
ANA ALICIA GARZA
A spy, travelling as a journalist – James Agee in America, the ‘Kingdom of Might-Have-Been’
14 ARTS
ELIZABETH LOWRY PATRICIA A. MATTHEW Sibyl William Kentridge (Barbican) Sanditon (ITV, PBS). Bridgerton (Netflix)
16 FICTION
MIRANDA SEYMOUR LINDSAY DUGUID HAL JENSEN LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN
18 LITERARY CRITICISM CARYL EMERSON
The Chosen Elizabeth Lowry Mother’s Boy Patrick Gale Chilean Poet Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell Pollak’s Arm Hans von Trotha; Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
Eurasia without Borders – The dream of a leftist literary commons, 1919–1943 Katerina Clark. Internationalist Aesthetics – China and early Soviet culture Edward Tyerman
20 PSYCHOLOGY
21 CLASSICS
22 MIDDLE EAST
24 IN BRIEF
DOUWE DRAAISMA
BARBARA GRAZIOSI
RAPHAEL CORMACK ROBERT IRWIN RUTH MICHAELSON
The Rag and Bone Shop – How we make memories and memories make us Veronica O’Keane
Homer – The very idea James I. Porter
The Last Nahdawi – Taha Hussein and institution building in Egypt Hussam R. Ahmed Arabs and Arabists – Selected articles Alastair Hamilton Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller Nadia Wassef
Lucid – A memoir of an extreme decade in an extreme generation Lucy Holden, etc
26 MEMOIRS
27 AFTERTHOUGHTS
28 NB
JONATHAN BUCKLEY
IRINA DUMITRESCU
M. C.
When the Dust Settles – Stories of love, loss and hope from an expert in disaster Lucy Easthope
The art of improv – Wobbling through life
English idioms, Everyman’s Library, Isabelle Huppert’s Orlando, Brooklyn’s prize problem
Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LIBBY WHITE (libby.white@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)
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TLS
MAY 6, 2022
