Friday, January 31, 2025

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – life, death and a gnarly dildo

Review

Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – life, death and a gnarly dildo

Raven Row, London
These intense and intimate photographs of 70s and 80s New York – from a lounging William Burroughs to a masturbating dancer – constantly sweep you away

Adrian Searle

Thu 30 Jan 2025 17.49 GMT

Peter Hujar’s Eyes Open in the Dark is filled with intimacies and confrontations, empty lots, New York up close and seen from afar, hidden spaces and days in the country, sex and bodies, life and death. The effects are cumulative, taking us on a journey that is filled with variety, tenderness and vulnerability, surprise and shock.

Marianne Fauthfull was a towering artist

Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as

Alexis Petridis

30 January 2025

It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.

Marianne Faithfull, 1967
Photo by Marc Sharrat

Marianne Faithfull, singular icon of British pop, dies aged 78

Singer and actor overcame drug addiction and homelessness to collaborate with everyone from the Rolling Stones and Metallica to Jean-Luc Godard

Beaumont-Thomas Music editor

Thu 30 Jan 2025 18.30 GMT

Marianne Faithfull, whose six-decade career marked her out as one of the UK’s most versatile and characterful singer-songwriters, has died aged 78.

MARISNNE FAITHFULL

Marianne Faithfull & Mick Jagger

Paul Newman, 100 years of the most intense blue gaze in cinema

Paul Newman.© BETTMANN/CORBIS

GREGORIO BELINCHÓN

Madrid - JAN 27, 2025 - 13:49 COT

On January 26, 1925, the small street of Renrock Road in Cleveland Heights, in the suburbs of Cleveland (Ohio), woke up snowy and icy enough for the Newman couple, Art and Theresa, to decide that their second child, Paul Leonard, should be born at home: 2025 marks the centenary of Newman’s birth, an actor who was possibly not the best among his peers, but arguably the most handsome and the one who best connected with his era and his generation, the owner of the most intense blue eyes in Hollywood. He was tenacious, intelligent, a charmer and an icon of the 20th century. He triumphed in the cinema and in motor racing, the passion that truly filled his life. And, incidentally, he drank countless liters of beer throughout his life: that’s why, for years, he wore a chain around his neck with a bottle opener. His genes and constant exercise allowed his prodigious physique to not be affected by his alcoholism.

Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis at the Toronto Film Festival last September.GARETH CATTERMOLE (GETTY IMAGES FOR IMDB)

ENEKO RUIZ JIMÉNEZ

Madrid - JAN 25, 2025 - 23:30 COT

Jamie Lee Curtis said it best upon being nominated for her 2023 Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once: “I’m 64 years old. I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you shit. I never thought I would hear my name at the Oscars.” This year, after winning the award and enjoying a career renaissance, Curtis is back in the headlines for her work on The Last Showgirl. That film stars Pamela Anderson, another actress who is back in the spotlight after surviving the release of biographical miniseries Pam and Tommy, which brought the lurid moment of her sex tape back into public discourse. “This is the best payback,” Anderson has told the press. “I’m being seen and recognized for my work and not these tawdry moments.”

Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in a file photo at a bar in Hollywood, California.JOHN SCIULLI (GETTY

Pamela Anderson doesn’t need redemption: ‘It was my boobs that had a career, I was just part of the package’

In a new Netflix documentary, the ‘Baywatch’ actress looks back on her career, her fall from grace after the notorious sex tape, and how she managed to bounce back

ENRIQUE ALPAÑÉS

Madrid - JAN 29, 2023 - 06:12 COT

In the first scene of her Netflix documentary Pamela Anderson, A Love Story (out on January 31), Anderson inserts a video into the VCR and says mischievously that she hopes she doesn’t appear naked in it. The actress is alluding to her sex tape with her then-partner, Tommy Lee – which destroyed her career, upended the internet and made her an icon. Clearly, the idea is to send the elephant in the room packing immediately. The story of the Anderson-Lee sex tape is part of pop culture and was recently been told on the Hulu miniseriesPam & Tommy.

The Glass Pearks / Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

By Lucy Scholes

October 18, 2019

RE-COVERED

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Emily Brontë

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

by Emily Brontë

Pink Japanese lanterns adorn the vibrant cherry blossom trees in full bloom against the backdrop of Tokyo, Japan's picturesque landscape

Embracing imperfection: celebrating Sakura

Exploring Hanami: Japan's Wabi-Sabi tradition of cherry blossom festivities

12 JULY 2024,

ORSOLYA ANTONI

One of my favourite seasons is spring. It signifies the beginning of a fresh new year for me. When everything comes back to life, the trees are in full bloom, and the ground is covered in nice green grass, it's a time for new beginnings and new lives. There's a certain magic in the air when warm sunshine, a gentle breeze, and fresh air combine. Imagine experiencing this in Japan, where Sakura, the most enchanting season of the year, unfolds. The beauty of Sakura is a sight to behold, a spectacle that draws you in and leaves you in awe.

John Singer Sargent / Gassed

Gassed
John Singer Sargent
oil, 7½ by 20 feet 1919

GASSED

by John Singer Sargent

"Gassed is a very large oil painting completed in March 1919 by John Singer Sargent. It depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front in July 1918 spending time with the Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres. The painting was finished in March 1919 and voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum."

The Secrets of John Singer Sargent’s Jewess, Lady Adele Meyer

How the American master came to this living portrait, true to life—but what life?

BY
JEREMY SIGLER
JUNE 14, 2017

John Singer Sargent’s prized 1896 portrait of Lady Adele Meyer and her children (Elsie Charlotte and Frank Cecil), which has been shown off and on at the Jewish Museum in New York, greets us with the image of a graying, 41-year-old, wealthy English patron of the opera, Lady Meyer, decked out in a pink satin and organdy dress. Her pale face is dappled with cosmetics and her dewy Drew Barrymore-ish eyes and lips are hypnotic and compelling. Her plunging neckline does not reveal cleavage, but the painting seems to play with our expectations by offering us a tall man’s view on the world.

Holy Delmore

The originary 20th-century American Jewish writer and poet is famous for his descent into drug-addled madness. A new collection shows quantities of self-obsessed dreck shot through with redeeming literary and critical genius.

DAVID MIKICS

JULY 11, 2024

The New York intellectuals, Irving Howe once said, were obsessed “by the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz).” Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.) Then his first book of poetry arrived, hailed by Allen Tate as “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot.” But he came to a dismal end, an alcoholic and pill addict burdened by paranoid fantasies. Since Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and James Atlas’ classic biography, Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.

Friday, January 31, 2025