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1 week 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.
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4 weeks ago | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro |Michael Prodger |Kate Mossman |Zoe Huxford
“Call me Ishmael”, the opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,commands the reader. In her exciting feminist reimagining of the classic, the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo instructs the reader to call the narrator Ishmaelle. Guo’s plot follows a similar trajectory to the original. The cast is slightly changed; Captain Ahab becomes Captain Seneca and rather than sailing on the Pequod, Ishmaelle finds herself on the Nimrod.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a compulsive portraitist, and an odd one. Portraiture is the most transactional of genres; images produced, by and large, at the behest of and for the sitter. Munch produced hundreds of portraits over the course of his career but a great number of them were neither commissioned nor handed over: he painted people for himself and painted them how he wanted to.
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1 month ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger
This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Were President Trump that way inclined, he might usefully ginger up his speeches with references to The Columbiad, a grandiloquent poem of 8,350 lines in nine volumes written by Joel Barlow and published in 1807.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Pippa Bailey |Michael Prodger |Finn McRedmond |Megan Gibson
Humans of every religion and none have made pilgrimages since ancient times: for example, the sacred mountain of Tai Shan, 300 miles south of Beijing, has a history of worship dating back to the Neolithic period. Pilgrims sought – and seek – the help of gods, saints and spirits for protection on journeys, spiritual healing or cures for physical ailments, to give thanks, or perhaps to make a political statement.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
On 9 June 1311, the people of Siena witnessed the most extraordinary sight they had ever beheld. Word had got out that something miraculous had been created in the workshop of the painter Duccio di Buoninsegna on the Via Stalloreggi, a narrow, dipping street on the hill crowned by the Duomo, and crowds had gathered.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zoe Huxford |Barney Horner
The curse of the subtitle of Christopher de Bellaigue’s study of the most powerful of all Ottoman sultans, Suleyman the Magnificent (1494-1566), was that the sultanate had no history of primogeniture. The demise of a sultan meant more than one death as his assorted male offspring jostled bloodily for position – brothers and half-brothers suddenly became rivals to be disposed of.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Pippa Bailey |Nicholas Harris
In 1879, shortly before the 1884 Berlin Conference let loose the “scramble for Africa”, King Leopold of Belgium, the most brutal of the colonial overlords, came up with a scheme to give him an added advantage. He shipped four Asian elephants and their mahouts from India to the east coast of Africa and marched them inland to use them as teachers in a training school for African elephants – which then existed in a population 20 to 30 times larger than today.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger
“I define my work as a feminist and political act… I am Black, Queer and a Woman,” says the American artist Mickalene Thomas. It is a proud declaration, albeit one that might lead some viewers to expect work light on joyousness and heavy on messaging. In fact, the opposite is true: in Thomas’s rhinestone-spattered, patterned and vivid paintings, collages and photographs it is a case of exuberance first and all other concerns can wait.
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2 months ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger
This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Thomas Girtin was born 250 years ago this year and his short life offers one of the great counterfactuals of British art. His friend JMW Turner was also born in 1775, and the careers of the two young painters emerged in tandem.
