Sunday, April 30, 2017

Here’s 49-Year-Old Pamela Anderson




Here’s 49-Year-Old Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot

Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot


April 6, 2017
by Chike Ezegbu
Former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson posing for bondage-inspired lingerie photoshoot shouldn’t come as a shock to you. The 49-year-old is one of the few who shows that age is nothing but a number. Mind you, she turns 50 in July!
Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot
Pamela Anderson was pictured by iconic photographer Rankin for lingerie line Coco de Mer.
Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot
See more Pamela Anderson bondage-inspired lingerie photoshoot below.
Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot
Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot
Pamela Anderson Posing For Bondage-Inspired Lingerie Photoshoot






Saturday, April 29, 2017

United Airlines Faces Questions Over Death of Giant Rabbit



United Airlines Faces Questions Over Death of Giant Rabbit


LONDON — Call it the curse of O’Hare.

Less than three weeks after a passenger was dragged off a United Airlines flight at the Chicago airport, the carrier found itself facing another public relations fiasco on Wednesday after a three-foot-long rabbit died on a flight from Britain.

The continental giant rabbit, Simon, which was bound for O’Hare, had a veterinary checkup three hours before takeoff from Heathrow Airport near London and was “fit as a fiddle,” his breeder said. The animal was traveling to a buyer in the United States.




Continental giants are an ancient breed, descended, appropriately enough, from Flemish giants. They are known to be gentle, friendly and intelligent, as rabbits go. An enthusiasts’ website says the giant makes “a fantastic house rabbit” but that “cables, wires, shoes, papers and anything important” should be kept out of its way, as it will chew them to bits.

Simon’s death remained a mystery on Wednesday. “Something very strange has happened, and I want to know what,” the breeder, Annette Edwards, told the British tabloid The Sun.

A United Airlines spokesman said the company had been “saddened” by the news and was investigating the matter.

“The safety and well-being of all the animals that travel with us is of the utmost importance to United Airlines and our PetSafe team,” a United spokesman, Kevin Johnston, said in an emailed response.




The airline is still recovering from a public uproar over a video showing a passenger being forcibly taken off a United Express flight to Louisville, Ky., from Chicago. Dr. David Dao, 69, had refused to give up his seat to crew members, and was dragged off the plane by aviation police officers summoned by United staff.

Dr. Dao sustained a broken nose, a concussion, two knocked-out teeth and sinus problems that could require reconstructive surgery, his lawyer said a few days later.

Simon the rabbit died in the cargo section of a Boeing 767 some time after takeoff, Ms. Edwards said. Only 10 months old, he had been expected to grow into the world’s biggest rabbit, surpassing his father, Darius, who grew to be 4 feet 4 inches.

According to the most recent figures from the United States Department of Transportation, released in February, 35 animals died in transit across 17 airlines in the United States in 2015.

United Airlines accounted for 14 of those deaths. The carrier transported nearly 100,000 animals over that period, a further nine of which were reported as injured.

“I’ve sent rabbits all around the world, and nothing like this has happened before,” said Ms. Edwards, whose breeding operation is in Worcestershire, England.




Friday, April 28, 2017

A life in writing / Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal, photographed in Highbury, London
Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Guardian
A LIFE IN WRITING
‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’
Maylis de Kerangal, the French author and winner of the 2017 Wellcome prize for writing, on grief, heart surgery and surfing
Claire Armitstead
Friday 28 April 2017 11.00 BST


I
f there was ever a novel that offered a metaphor for its writer’s life, Mend the Living is it: it opens with a towering evocation of the surfing life and Maylis de Kerangal herself is on the crest of a wave. The French novelist was in London last weekend for a series of talks to celebrate the shortlist of this year’s Wellcome prize for writing that encompasses medicine, health or illness. After a dash back to Paris to be with her family for the results of the first round of the French election, she returned to London on Monday to discover that she had become only the second novelist to win the £30,000 award. Four days later a film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Katell Quillévéré with a high profile cast headed by Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner.

Mend the Living (Heal the Living in the film version) is the story of a heart transplant, which cascades with the irresistible impetus of an Atlantic roller from the death of a teenager in a van accident as he returns with his friends from an early morning surfing session, to the implantation of his heart into a middle-aged woman. “From its glorious 300-word first sentence to the stately canopic imagery of its climactic scenes, Mend the Living mimics the rhythm of the processes it depicts – the troughs and peaks of grief and protocol, of skills utilised and acceptance finally achieved,” wrote Guardian reviewer M John Harrison.
The journey of Simon Limbeau’s heart is crowded with strangers with whom, through the briefest of sketches, we become intimately acquainted. They range from the intensive care consultant who declares Simon brain dead to the young nurse who tends to his still warm body. Along the way we encounter the biomedical agency officer responsible for matching donors and recipients, the transplant surgeons and the presiding angel of the story, the organ donation nurse who talks Simon’s parents into making available their son’s heart, liver and kidneys, guards his body as medical teams from all over France descend for the “harvesting”, and then returns him to his family, washed, reshaped and sutured, 24 hours later.
It is a harrowing story, involving a boy the same age as one of De Kerangal’s own sons. It ambushed the mother-of-four after her own father suffered a fatal heart attack while she was working on a different novel. “I stopped writing that book … couldn’t go further … couldn’t act as if nothing had changed,” she says.
“A few months later I was in Marseille and I wanted to understand what is a heart. I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.”
It helped that her brother is a cardiovascular surgeon, who was on hand to advise on such intricacies of transplant surgery as the colour of a body that is in the process of being harvested (is it red or blue?). Mend the Living reflects two aspects of De Kerangal’s own family biography: firstly that she comes from a medical dynasty that now extends to four generations, and secondly that they are “a family of the sea”.
Born in 1967, she grew up in the northern French port of Le Havre, one of five children of a teacher and a naval officer, who was away at sea for months at a time. Her three brothers were all surfers, in honour of which familial obsession their father nailed a plaque to the garden gate that read: “On the seventh day God went surfing.”
De Kerangal herself was an all-rounder, who left school for universities in Rouen and Paris, to study history, philosophy and ethnology. In her early 20s she landed a job with a publisher, where she spent five years editing travel guides, returning to university as a mature student to take a further degree in anthropology. “I can’t say I always intended to be a writer because when I was young I was very ‘dispersée’ – I wasn’t a steady person with one vocation. I loved history, anthropology, theatre …”
It wasn’t until she had given birth to her first child, and put her career on hold to travel to Colorado with her engineer husband, that she began to write. “That stay in the US was very important to me. It was when I was separated from my country and my language for the first time,” she says. “But it was also a revolution for me because it changed my impression of time and space: I discovered the open prairie. It was a completely different life and, after growing up in a house full of people, I was alone. In the first week I thought I could write something about my previous years as a travel editor and I did it.”
She returned with a first novel published in France in 2000 and (like all except her two most recent novels) as yet untranslated, but also with the ingredients of a later work that would mark her breakthrough on to the international stage.
Birth of a Bridge is the story of a vanity project conceived by a hubristic politician – the construction of a six-lane suspension bridge in a fictional US town. Published in French in 2010 and in English four years later, it introduced Anglophone readers to her signature style of free-flowing sentences studded with technical vocabulary, and a chorus of characters who serve a monolithic narrative structure.
The novel won prizes in France and Italy – and its reissue in paperback at a time when the US is grappling with the consequences of Donald Trump’s victory and Marine Le Pen has reached the final stage of France’s election –seems more than a lucky coincidence. It has a deep but understated political intelligence and is populated with just the sorts of put-upon people that have brought such mavericks to power: blue-collar workers, itinerant tradesmen and first nation drifters hired as footsoldiers in an international project dreamed up by “the Boa”, who is determined to put his town – and himself – on the world map regardless of the cost to the environment or to the indigenous population.
It isn’t until well over halfway through the novel that we get the full measure of the Boa, in a single paragraph outlining his arrival on the political scene: “He causes a stir – he is the reform and the new – and by bypassing the elite, supplanting the local heirs, and using surprise, he creates a tactical advantage that lasts until his election. During his final campaign speech, he presents himself as Prince Charming, called to wake Sleeping Beauty. The one you’ve all been waiting for to begin living again.”
De Kerangal shrugs off the topicality of the character she transported from the US in the early 2000s and incubated for more than a decade. “I wanted at the time to do something that could resolve the sense of globalisation, and I thought that Boa would be the kind of person who could incarnate the desire for power but who has no education for it. He is a small person with huge ambition and no background.”


Mend the Living also carries a topical frisson at a time when traditional concepts of the sanctity of life are facing ever more technical challenges. Her ICU surgeon, Pierre Revol, was born in 1959 which he likes to consider a critical year: “Triumph of the Cuban revolution … filming of Godard’s Breathless, release of Burroughs’Naked Lunch and Miles Davis’s mythical Kind of Blue.”

More significantly, it was the year in which the concept of life was changed for ever by two French doctors, Maurice Goulon and Pierre Mollaret, who informed the 23rd International Neurology Meeting that their work with patients in deep coma had demonstrated that “the heart stopping is no longer the sign of death, from now on it’s the cessation of brain function … In other words: if I don’t think any more therefore I am no more. Deposition of the heart and coronation of the brain – a symbolic coup d’état, a revolution.”
The novel dramatises this altered reality in a devastating scene in which a young nurse is scolded by Revol for talking to Simon as she tends to him, as if he was alive. He’s dead, says the doctor, and to behave otherwise will merely confuse his parents.

It’s a mark of the resonance of the novel that, besides the film, it has already had two stage productions and two versions in English. The US version, translated by Sam Taylor, was titled simply The Heart, while the Canadian poet Jessica Moore was responsible for the version published in the UK and Canada as Mend the Living.

Both highlighted different aspects of the novel, says De Kerangal, but Moore brought to it – and to Birth of a Bridge – the ear of a poet. Moore in turn describes De Kerangal as “a brilliant but difficult author”, writing that “everything about [her] writing pushes the reader (and translator) to widen her thoughts, to stretch her use of language. Nothing is banal or by rote.”
There are hopes of a translation of her fifth novel, Corniche Kennedy, an “epic chronicle” of a group of young divers from Marseille who become fascinated by a girl from a higher social class, which was published in France in 2008 and made into a low-budget film in France earlier this year.
Teenagers hanging out in coastal towns are a recurrent presence in De Kerangal’s novels, though she herself now lives the life of a full-time writer in Paris – working in a housekeeper’s attic a few Métro stops from the apartment in which she and her husband have brought up their four children, aged between nine and 23.

Her writing and her life are inextricably entwined. “I am the sort of writer who needs another form to tell me who I am and what has happened to me,” she says. “I think all my novels are self-portraits, but there’s no one character who resolves me, or catalyses me, or is me.” In Mend the Living, she can be glimpsed in both Marianne, the mother whose benediction allows her son’s heart to go on its journey, and Claire, the mother who receives it.
In the film, Claire is portrayed as the ex-lover of a musician in the soft-focus of a lesbian love story that doesn’t exist in the novel. De Kerangal made Claire a translator, a role that sums up her attitude to the relationship between fiction and reality, language and the life that it articulates and represents. “For me she couldn’t have been anything but a translator because translators keep within their language room for another. They can give hospitality to other languages.”
The novel is framed by a translation: a line of dialogue from Platonov, an early drama by the physician playwright Chekhov. To the question “What shall we do?” comes the answer “Bury the dead and mend the living.” The word “mend”, De Kerangal points out, suits her project better than “heal” – it suggests a tough and practical approach to the philosophical and spiritual questions of human existence. Like Birth of a Bridge, it holds the concrete and the conceptual in suspension, enacting and interrogating each other through the agency of fiction.
 Mend the Living is published by MacLehose.




Owner of the world's biggest bunny spends £10,000 on plastic surgery to look like... Jessica Rabbit



Hopping mad: Annette Edwards, 57, has had plastic surgery to look like Jessica Rabbit


Owner of the world's biggest bunny spends £10,000 on plastic surgery to look like... Jessica Rabbit

 Daily Mail Reporter 
UPDATED: 12:15 BST, 3 December 2009



The owner of the world's biggest bunny has splashed out £10,000 on plastic surgery to transform herself into a real-life Jessica Rabbit.

Annette Edwards, 57, has spent thousands to look like the Who Killed Roger Rabbit? film character after a life dedicated to the creatures.

Ms Edwards, a former model, is a world famous breeder of the animals and is the proud owner of Alice, the biggest rabbit in the world.

Monday, April 24, 2017

GAME OF THRONES FANS ARE FREAKING OUT OVER THIS PHOTO OF JON SNOW




GAME OF THRONES FANS ARE FREAKING OUT OVER THIS PHOTO OF JON SNOW


By Erica Gonzalez
April 20, 2017



Earlier today, HBO surprised us with new photos from Game of Thrones' seventh season. It didn't take long for fans to analyze the pictures and string together some theories on the upcoming plot.
This picture of Jon Snow has specifically attracted a lot of attention (and no, not just because Kit Harington is easy on the eyes). If you look closely at the background, it seems he's standing in the crypts of Winterfell, as told by the dark lighting and enclosed stone arches behind him. The location is significant because Lyanna Stark, Ned's sister and Snow's biological mother (which was confirmed last season), is buried there. Hence, a new theory supposes that in this photo, Jon is looking at Lyanna's grave.
Does that mean he discovers his true patronage in Season 7? How does he find out? Who tells him? And what is his reaction like if/when he realizes he's not Ned Stark's son, but Lyanna's? More importantly, does he also find out that his father is Rhaegar Targaryen? According to another theory, a clue about Snow's real father lies in Lyanna's crypt.
What's certain is that it seems Jon has learned something in this scene. Maybe he really doesn't "know nothing" after all.



Saturday, April 22, 2017

This much I know / Jane Birkin / ‘I learned French off a tape recorder. All the French people laughed’

‘I was rather a bad version of Jean Shrimpton’Jane Birkin
Photo by Nico Bustos

This much I know

Jane Birkin: ‘I learned French off a tape recorder. All the French people laughed’

The singer and actor, 70, on sexy pictures, Glenda Jackson and her first concert – at the Bataclan

Rebecca Nicholson
Saturday 22 April 2017

If your mother has been an actress and your grandmother’s been an actress, there’s certainly an encouragement. My father wanted me to be a painter, so my mother helped me on the secret side. She got a lot of stick for that. But in the end my father adored me in films.
Had it all worked out with John Barry [her first husband, whom she married at 18], I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else. I would have just gone on being his wife, I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate [their daughter, who died in 2013], I had to find a job quite fast.
I learned French off a tape recorder and from what Serge [Gainsbourg] would teach me, which was slang. Everybody laughed. I don’t know how much I genuinely wanted to get better at it or how much I wanted to make all French people laugh.

I did comedies and sexy pictures. The sexy pictures are a bit depressing when you come out of a wonderful concert and somebody turns to you with nude photographs for you to sign. I’d quickly sign over the bottom. It happens more and more now because they get them off the internet.
I was a rather bad version of Jean Shrimpton. That’s who I wanted to look like. When I look back at photos and see myself in Blow Up or La Piscine, I’m not very interesting.
We were on a television programme just before Serge died. They asked me, what’s he to you? And I said, “toi”, which means “you”, a stupid answer, but it was all I could think of. And then they asked Serge what I was to him, and he said “émoi”. I thought he’d said, “et moi”, but he said émoi, which means to be moved, emotion. I think that’s why he wrote for me. Those songs were messages. They’re really quite strange to sing.
Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus, with no make-up and dressed like a boy – that was pretty gorgeous. And Serge was gorgeous, too. It was the prettiest time.
When I saw pictures of Glenda Jackson at 80, I thought, ‘Oh wow, if I could be like her!’ It’s probably to keep your own morale up, but you find people getting more and more gorgeous the older you get.
I’m not curious, but I’ve got very curious friends. I’ve got a friend who takes me to the theatre three times a week and a girlfriend who takes me to see three movies in a night, sometimes. A few years ago I realised how much it helps to go into other people’s stories. I’m a great follower. If someone’s got a great idea of what to do then I simply love it.
I was 40 when I did my first concert, at the Bataclan. I cut my hair off like a boy, I wore men’s clothes. I only wanted people to hear the music and the words. It was fantastic. And it was so frightening. Serge was there and he kept lighting his cigarette lighter to make everybody put their lighters on when I sang Fuir Le Bonheur. All this began at 40. People should never think it’s all over when you’re very young.
Jane Birkin’s first studio album in nine years Birkin/Gainsbourg Le Symphonique is out now
THE GUARDIAN



THIS MUCH I KNOW


2004

2005

2013

2014

2016

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Why Jackson Pollock gave up painting

Jackson Pollock


Why Jackson Pollock gave up painting


With their sooty pools and block structures, the ‘black pour’ paintings of Pollock’s late period mark his rejection of sex and the erotic aspects of his drip techniques. A new exhibition shows how the artist formerly known as ‘Jack the Dripper’ reached the end of the line


James Hall
Friday 19 June 2015 11.30 BST

After Late Matisse, Late Rembrandt and Late Turner comes Late Pollock, the most daring late show of all. Jackson Pollock (1912-56), the great leaky Prometheus of American art, is always assumed to have peaked around 1950, thereafter succumbing to the demons of drink, depression, adultery and cack-handed and colourless quasi-figuration, followed by (in 1953) painter’s block. Pollock’s descent into hell ended horrifyingly and murderously when, in an alcohol-fuelled rage, he drove his convertible Oldsmobile into a tree at 80mph, decapitating himself and killing a female passenger – and nearly killing his young mistress – in the process. No wonder Pollock has been the textbook example of Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives.







Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream, 1953
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 Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream 1953. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Tate Liverpool’s show flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and looks set to be one of the most provocative and absorbing shows of the year. It centres on the so-called “black pour” paintings, made from 1951-3 using black enamel paint on unprimed canvas, which is often left bare. The enamel is iridescent and tar-like when it pools; sooty when it soaks directly into the linen fabric. These were Pollock’s attempts to move on from the expansive, multilayered drip paintings that had made him the most famous artist in the US, Jack the Dripper. His ascetic diet of black, bulked up with enigmatic biomorphic bits and pieces, seems to have been an attempt to counter claims that his “all-over” pictures were facile, flimsy, hedonistic and decorative. As early as 1948, Leigh Ashton, director of the V&A, had said that Pollock’s Cathedral (exhibited here as a contextual piece) “would make a most enchanting printed silk”, and in March 1951, American Vogue staged a photoshoot with a model in silk evening gown before Lavender Mist. Pollock wrote to a friend three months later: “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru – think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it’s simple to splash a Pollock out.” No one would want to buy a “black pour” fabric, or use one as a backdrop for a selfie, though as Aubrey Beardsley demonstrated with his ink drawings, black lines can be very sexy.
A number of New York artists – including the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning – had recently tried painting in a restricted palette of black and white, but Pollock’s black pours are especially distinctive because of their drily rebarbative, block-like structures. They don’t feel as if they have been effortlessly “splashed out” (code for “ecstatically ejaculated”) so much as strenuously carved and kneaded. Rather than being “all-over”, with the potential for limitless lateral spread, they often have a tight internal frame that seems to compress the contents. This is most apparent in Untitled (Black and White Polyptych) (1951), which comprises four discrete components of blockish shape lined up horizontally. Each section was turned into individual screenprints that stop well short of the edges of the paper.







Jackson Pollock, Yellow Islands (1952). Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015
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 Jackson Pollock, Yellow Islands, 1952. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015

The catalyst for this shift was a resurgence, in the late 1940s, of Pollock’s long-standing interest in sculpture. Writing to his father as a 20-year-old in 1932, he had expressed a preference for the form: “I’ll never be satisfied until I’m able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will.” Gutzon Borglum was then dynamiting and jackhammering presidential heads into the granite cliffs of Mount Rushmore. At this time Pollock carved a small black basalt head, a death mask with closed eyes. His painting teacher, the muralist Thomas Hart Benton, got his students to make small plasticine versions of the figures in their paintings. Most of Pollock’s subsequent sculptures (about 12 are known, with five exhibited here) are like miniaturised 3D incarnations of his drip pictures, made from bent wire, plaster and papier mache. The spirit of sculpture even informs his intensely physical painting methods. He worked in a barn, with a vast canvas laid unstretched on the floor, crouching over it, approaching from all angles: it echoes traditional images of the sculptor crouching over a lump of stone, carving “in the round”. One impetus for his late experiments with sculpture may have come from the publication of the first book about Picasso’s scarcely known sculptures in 1949, which created a buzz around the idea of the “painter-sculptor”.
Most of Pollock’s late imagery is suggestively and surreally figurative rather than clearly narrative – except in the case of what has been called his last major work,Portrait and a Dream (1953). Featured in the Tate exhibition, this comprises two distinct parts, like a diptych. The left half – the “dream” – is a squarish skein of poured, squirted and blotched black lines within which we can discern the fragmented lineaments of a reclining female nude, with a multilayered spiky head at top right. Pollock’s long-suffering wife, the artist Lee Krasner, recalled him saying that the top right part was the “dark side of the moon”: traditionally the moon is a female element and visible at night, the time for sex and dreaming. Pollock was fascinated by psychoanalytic readings of symbols, and had several courses of therapy.







Jackson Pollock, Untitled 1951. Courtesy of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
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 Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1951. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

The “portrait” side is usually interpreted as a self-portrait, and the frontal format is similar to that of an earlier self-portrait with staring bug eyes, painted in the 1930s using a fiery palette of oranges, reds and browns. The 1953 self-portrait is lacerated with patches of whisky-orange and yellow, suggesting smouldering passions, barely held in check. Here, however, the side of the face and eye nearest the moon woman is covered by a bulbous Picassoid growth that completely masks it – and which prevents him from seeing her.
Portrait and a Dream addresses an issue that had been of obsessive interest to artists and thinkers for at least a century: the relationship between sex and genius. Should male artists be having sex, or should they be channelling their sexual energy into their work? The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that great male artists were physically strong with lots of surplus sexual energy, and prone to intoxication – “how wise it is at times to be a little tipsy!” But much of the time the male genius was chaste (and sober), refusing “to expend himself in any casual way”. In Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Wake (1899), the sculptor hero (based on Rodin) believes his artistic vision will be lost if he so much as touches or desires his female model. Pollock would have known Picasso’s Vollard Suite of the 1930s, a series of prints in which a sculptor does his best not to look at his naked models, and, in some, fixates instead on his own self-portrait bust, almost as if he were Narcissus staring at his own reflection after rejecting the advances of the nymph Echo.







Jackson Pollock, Number 7 1952. Courtesy of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
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 Jackson Pollock, Number 7, 1952. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

In what should more accurately be called Masked Self-Portrait and a Wet Dream, Pollock (left) seems to be repudiating not just sex and sexual desire, but the uninhibitedly erotic aspects of his drip technique. No wonder he stopped painting. Without ecstasy, without an art of feeling and sublimated sexual energy, he had reached the end of the road.
 James Hall is the author of The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History (Thames & Hudson). Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots takes place at Tate Liverpool, 30 June - 18 October. tate.org.uk.