My life in art: How Jean-Michel Basquiat taught me to forget about technique
Basquiat may have had no formal training, but his visceral work communicates with absolute clarity and urgency his own experience of life, writes Will Gompertz
Will Gompertz 12 February 2009
I've just taken delivery of an extraordinary work of art. It's a contemporary homage to John Everett Millais's famous Ophelia. I think mine is way better than Millais's original, which, although technically brilliant, is a tad formal for my taste. Which isn't that surprising. Millais was a senior member of the art establishment – a serious and important man. The artist who painted my version has never had a job, and has absolutely no truck with all that establishment glad-handing. He's far more interested in chocolate ice cream and bedtime stories.
Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) is a Los Angeles-based photographer who creates portraits, still lifes and landscapes, which simultaneously inhabit, defamiliarise and disrupt the realm of the everyday.
Depicting situations that can appear overly familiar, Rødland’s photographs reveal an underlying lyricism and poetic language that result from the artist’s reconfiguration of the diverse material and media that surround us.
A leading artist among the Abstract Expressionists, Willem de Kooning never believed that abstraction and representation were mutually exclusive. As he stated: “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it–drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.” Woman and Bicycle, one of a series of “Woman” paintings he made between 1950 and 1953, depicts a standing woman, whose form is clearly visible despite the painterly integration of her body into the surrounding field of non-objective marks. Although the female figure is one of the most traditional subjects in the history of art, the woman in de Kooning’s painting distinctly belongs to the 1950s. Her bright yellow dress, high heels, and garish smile—with a second toothy grin hanging below it like a necklace—reflect the glamorous pin-up girls and movie stars of the period.
The artist Willem de Kooning changed my life. Before De Kooning I had no real interest in art. Constable was for the top of cake tins and Warhol seemed no more than a competent graphic designer. I took a very literal view of art, whereas I found movies, music and books transformative – all of which would have been quite normal if I was 12-years-old, or even 17. But I wasn't: I was 25. I had managed to live a quarter of a century without art making any notable impression on me. And, to be honest, the circumstances which started this late journey were only brought about through ulterior motives.
T&C spoke to the artist in Qatar around the opening of a landmark new exhibition.
BY PHYLLIS TUCHMAN
Lost in America, Jeff Koons’s current retrospective in Qatar, features 60-some sculptures and paintings. There are golden oldies like "Rabbit (1986)," "Buster Keaton (1988)," and "Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994-2000)" as well as newer works like "Party Hat (Pink)(1994-2019)" and "Ballet Couple (2010-2019)."
The American artist's giant sculpture of a balloon pooch didn't impress me much until I came face to face with it in Manhattan, writes Will Gompertz
Will Gompertz Thursday 10 November 2008
I hate fireworks. They're expensive, even more disappointing than a Bob Dylan gig and are gratuitously noisy. The unexpected bangs make me jump and petrify my dog. Last night we went to bed together.
My life in art: How Anthony Caro's steel works stole my heart
After encountering Caro's sculptures, I realised metal could be breathtakingly beautiful. And nothing will deter me from sharing this with my family ... or the world
Will GompertzWednesday
22 October 2008
All artists are selfish. They have to be. You can't create a masterpiece if you're worrying about whether it's your turn on the kitchen rota. Writing requires a similar single-mindedness, where the needs of the creator come before all else. At least that's what I told my family – wife and four young children – when I recently insisted on a four-hour detour on a drive through France. As far as they were concerned, I was being a prat. I wanted to go and look at a bridge.
My life in art: The day Bourgeois moved me to tears
The rage, fear and frustration in Louise Bourgeois' autobiographical art shocked me into understanding what it must be like to be a woman
Will Gompertz
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
I
have been married for 15 years and I think things have gone pretty well. We have four perfectly acceptable children, we all get along OK, and as husbands go, I'm not a bad lot. I'm loyal, I recognise my wife as a superior human being and I even have the odd moment of unselfishness. (I expect such moments to be verbally recognised and physically rewarded.) My wife stays at home to look after the children because returning to the teaching job she loved was made impossible by the incompatibility of teacher's pay and the cost of childcare. The other option – of me becoming a househusband – was categorically not on the table. I don't mind a bit of gentle hoovering, but I do mind babies. They're like drunks: incomprehensible, unreasonable and prone to vomit on you. Anyway she loves it, doesn't she? Well, that's what I had assumed, until an incident a couple of weeks ago that shocked my smug, complacent, delusional self to the core.
Questions about a woman’s “place” resonate in our culture, and conventional ideas about the house as a feminine space persist. Global artists in Women House recast conventional ideas about the home through provocative photographs, videos, sculptures, and room-like installations. Louise Bourgeois and Laurie Simmons conceptualize the female body as the archetypal form of home.
Richard Ford: ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’
The Pulitzer prizewinning author on taking life lessons from Chekhov, warming to Woolf and reading Larkin on loop
Richard Ford
Friday 20 June 2023
My earliest reading memory My reading begins with the long period when I didn’t read books at all. I could read, but I was undiagnosed dyslexic and didn’t, because it was frustrating and often humiliating to be so slow. Eventually, by age 18, I became possessed by a glum sensation: “Is this really all there is?” Reading literature – at whatever snail’s pace I managed – suggested there was actually more out there for me than I’d known.
My favourite book growing up The World Book Encyclopedia. My parents bought this for me when I was eight and doing dismally in school, one red-leatherette volume for each gold-embossed letter of the alphabet. Polio, the Boer war, Abraham Lincoln, basketball: entries were short, informative and often happily had photographs.
The book that changed me as a teenager Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time story collection – when I was 19. These were short and deceptively easy to read. I liked the familiar Upper Michigan settings. And it impressed me that Nobel prize literature could have such ordinary locales and premises – a doctor taking his young son in a canoe across a forested lake to attend to an Indian woman enduring a dangerous pregnancy. This all surprised me and seemed relevant to life. Now, they seem to skimp on language and to oversimplify dense human experience.
The writer who changed by mind William Faulkner – in particular his novel Absalom, Absalom! It took me for ever to read this novel because it was so full of words. But I understood from it that readers read first in order to be treated to well-chosen language; not for plot or character or – God help us – for theme.
The book that made me want to be a writer Not a book but a short story. Frank O’Connor’s luminous Irish civil war story, Guests of the Nation, the last sentence of which is: “And anything that ever happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” I immediately wanted to put that line at the end of anything I could write.
The book I came back to Anton Chekhov’s stories. I read The Lady With the Dog when I was 18, but was too young to understand what happened, since nothing much seemed to be happening. But its promise was that big things are often happening when they don’t appear to be. The story asks us to concede that and to pay closer attention to life.
The book I reread The Waste Land by TS Eliot. I later heard the Caedmon recordings of Eliot reading this poem and realised he was just talking to me about everyday life, and wasn’t dressed in a mitre and clerical robes, quoting scripture from a pulpit – as I’d been taught in university.
The book I could never read again Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. For everything there’s a season. My life’s season is too short now for all those particular words.
The book I discovered later in life Mrs Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s 1925 modernist tour de force, which I undertook cold, as a possible “text” for a graduate course I was teaching at Columbia University. There’s something for a writer to learn on every page; not least of which is Woolf’s intense dedication to making Clarissa Dalloway – by my measure, a rather prosaic SW1 society dame – a compelling vessel and personage for her postwar age. Woolf reminds me that literary characters are not people but instruments made of words, dazzled into virtual life in order to be made use of by the writer and reader.
The book I am currently reading Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica. Of course, I’ve been reading it for years, a letter or two each night before turning off the light. When I get to the end I start again.
My comfort read I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere. I read only to learn something and to be delighted by it.
,%202008%20-%202016.jpeg)
![doha, qatar november 20 jeff koons poses during the press preview of his exhibition “lost in america” on november 20, 2021 at qatar museums gallery al riwaq in doha, qatar the exhibition opens as part of qatarcreates, a cultural celebration connecting the fields of art, fashion, and design through a diverse program of exhibitions, awards, public talks, and special events, all taking place in the heart of doha photo by cindy ordgetty images for qatar museums](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/1354564923.jpg?crop=0.9822294022617124xw:1xh;center,top&resize=1200:* "Press Preview For Qatar Museums' Exhibition "Jeff Koons: Lost in America" In Doha, Qatar")
