Andrew Graham-Dixon

Recommends rcmnd

• rcmnd What they recommend 5 things — each backed by an exact quote.

  Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.

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  • Recommends Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846 31 Jan 2019

    These are the writings of a painter who was so bad at art, and yet was one of the greatest prose writers of the nineteenth century. He completely mistook his vocation and wrote these utterly astonishing diaries in which all sorts of things crop up.

    fivebooks.com 31 Jan 2019

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  • Loved Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston 31 Jan 2019

    This is a brilliant piece of social history. It's a daughter's expression of love for her father, even though it was a complicated love. I think it's a very memorable portrait of a particular painter. She relates his work to his life, to his fathering, and regrets the toll taken on him by the rather damaging macho culture of the male artists of the New York School, who seemed to have felt obliged to drink at least a bottle of whiskey and smoke five packets of Camel no-filter cigarettes every day. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did, given that he died in his mid-sixties.

    fivebooks.com 31 Jan 2019

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  • Recommends Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable 31 Jan 2019

    This is a micro-study of how one might interpret the paintings of Turner and Constable and what they're really trying to do. It's one of the very few works I've ever read about Turner or Constable that addresses the real issues of their work.

    fivebooks.com 31 Jan 2019

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  • Loved The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers 31 Jan 2019

    This is an extremely fascinating account of nineteenth-century French art in the age of Baudelaire, Manet, and moving forward into the Impressionists.

    fivebooks.com 31 Jan 2019

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  • Loved Turner: Imagination and Reality 31 Jan 2019

    This catalogue was published on the occasion of the first ever exhibition of a long-dead painter at the Museum of Modern Art. It's only about thirty pages, but it is utterly brilliant.

    fivebooks.com 31 Jan 2019

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