Sublime

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge. That’s all that happens. Perhaps 99% of the works someone like Berggruen acquired in his life turned out to be of little value.

I open the Bernice Bing book. I look at her piece Velasquez Family. I don’t know how she does it. I want to paint like this. There are people in this strange painting, one with a green face and alarmingly red eyes, another like an animal with multiple limbs drawn in black paint and a blank white face, and a woman by a window, her face red, her hair

In a famous paper, ‘Death and the midlife crisis’, first published in 1965, Elliot Jacques argued that between the ages of 35 and 65 the work of creative artists changes, from a ‘hot’ and intense creativity to a more ‘sculpted’ one. This, he believed, showed that they’d worked through some of the emotional conflicts that had raged in their earlier