Michael Prodger

2 weeks 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”.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks 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.

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.

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.