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1 week ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger
This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25. An alternative title for John Singer Sargent’s celebrated portrait Madame X (1884) might be, “Be careful what you wish for”.
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1 week ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places.
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1 week ago | 
engelsbergideas.com | Michael Prodger
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, Philip Hoare, Fourth Estate, 464pp, £22Towards the end of his life, William Blake wrote that: ‘Mere natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me.’ Natural objects, he believed, were just pallid likenesses of spiritual objects, and it was those sublime originals that fired him.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
“Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself”: the words of Matthew 12:45 are echoed by Helen Oyeyemi in her latest novel. Kinga Sikora is Polish-born, a recently naturalised Czech: her interest as a protagonist is enhanced by there being seven versions of her. Each Kinga is allocated a day of the week and has a corresponding double-barrelled name: Kinga-Alojzia, Kinga-Blažena, Kinga-Casimira and so forth. But somewhere, dormant for now, lies the “OG Kinga”.
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1 month ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger
This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Artists’ estates and lawsuits are never too far apart. Money, particularly when there is oodles of it, turns art and the control of art, febrile. In the case of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the great American modernist who made the hardscrabble landscape of New Mexico her subject and her home, the scrapping started whilst she was still alive.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
In the first half of the 18th century, a rare but virulent new illness sprung to life in Mitteleuropa. Porzellankrankheit, or “porcelain sickness”, was an affliction of the wealthy: smitten by the plates and bowls that travelled in saddlebags along the Silk Road and emerged from the holds of Portuguese trading ships returning from the Far East, it was only the happy few who could afford to buy this enchanted, translucent material.
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1 month ago | 
apollo-magazine.com | Michael Prodger
From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. The walls of the National Gallery have always felt generously stocked, leaving barely a pause in the progression from one of the world’s great paintings to the next. Nevertheless, in global terms, the collection, however choice, is a small one: the Louvre has some 5,500 paintings, the Prado 8,000, while the Hermitage in St Petersburg groans under 17,000. So the 2,300 pictures housed at Trafalgar Square seems paltry by comparison.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the discoveries of America and a passage to the East Indies by Columbus and Vasco da Gama were “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind”. What wasn’t recorded quite so diligently were the disasters, privations, deaths and sheer haplessness that accompanied the 16th-century voyages into the unknown.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation.
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2 months ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger
This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. The sample is too small to make it anything other than a curious fact that many painters who were also poets have often been marked by a non-standard psychology.
