The big picture / Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso in Cannes, 1956

 

The big picture: Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso in Cannes, 1956

This article is more than 15 years old

The 21-year-old 'sex kitten' holds her own against the old predator, Picasso, during a visit to his studio at Vallauris, near Cannes, during the film festival in 1956

Peter Conrad
Sunday 8 May 2010

When the first Daguerreotype photograph was taken in the 1830s, a French artist sonorously prophesied: "From this day, painting is dead." It took Picasso to prove him wrong, by demonstrating the limits of photographic vision. The camera is restricted to surfaces; painting, if it is as aggressive and inquisitorial as Picasso's, can torment and transform the world of appearances, violently metamorphosing matter. "Reality must be torn apart," Picasso told his lover, Françoise Gilot. People, especially women, had to undergo the same painful fate.

Tough Guy / The Life of Norman Mailer by Richard Bradford review – a literary sucker punch

 

Norman Mailer arm wrestling with Muhammad Ali, 1 August 1965.

Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer by Richard Bradford review – a literary sucker punch

This article is more than 2 years old

The Naked and the Dead author was a brash and infuriating personality, but he deserves better than this dismissive biography, published to mark the centenary of his birth

Peter Conrad

Mon 9 Jan 2023 

Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby review – a tale of two greats

 

Charles Dickens and Prince

Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby review – a tale of two greats

This article is more than 2 years old

Hornby draws parallels between the Victorian novelist and the musician in this heartfelt homage to these brilliant, driven individuals

Peter Conrad

Mon 28 Nov 2022 

At the start of this heartfelt exercise in hero worship, Nick Hornby gathers together a throng of what he calls “My People” and ushers them into a VIP room in his head. They make up an eclectic pantheon, with Arsène Wenger jostling Joan Didion and the sitcom scriptwriters Galton and Simpson next to the gloomy painter Edward Hopper. Dickens and Prince are “two among many” in the gilded crowd, but Hornby singles them out for special homage. Dickens rescued him from the stupor of adolescence by showing that books were an escape route for the mind; Prince, with his keening falsetto, the prestidigitation of his guitar-playing and his hyperkinetic dance moves, delivered a physical excitement that is music’s special prerogative. Dickens made Hornby laugh, while Prince thrilled him by seeming to offer “hours of erotic ecstasy”.

 

Francis Bacon

BOOK OF THE DAY

Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words by Michael Peppiatt review – glimpses of a demon-driven genius

This article is more than 1 year old

Despite the painter’s lack of ‘epistolary fluency’, this collection of his writings – from drunken interviews to begging letters – offers some insight into his working methods and private life

Peter Conrad

Mon 6 May 2024 

Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.

 

Lord Byron

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters review – dispatches from a lusty life

This article is more than 1 year old

Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity

Peter Conrad

Tue 26 Mar 2024 

Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan, the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.

 

‘He contains the whole of literature’: is Dickens better than Shakespeare?

This article is more than 4 months old

After rereading the entire works of the great Victorian novelist during the pandemic, Peter Conrad became convinced – whisper it – that Dickens is an even greater writer than that other British literary giant, the Bard

Peter Conrad

Sunday 2 March 2025

Early in 2020, as society shut down, I retreated behind closed doors with Charles Dickens, who kept me company and cheered me up throughout the pandemic. Carried along by narratives that Dickens thought of as speedy locomotives and warmed by a combustible imagination that he compared to an industrial forge, I soon felt no need for tame timed circuits of the local park, and I even stopped fretting about the imminent end of the world. But although Dickens saved from me one disease, he infected me with another: escaping Covid-19, I contracted an incurable monomania instead.

 

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man review – a screen idol full of self-loathing

This article is more than 2 years old

A painfully revealing memoir, taken from transcripts of reminiscences Newman recorded in the 1980s, lays bare a candid, complicated star

Peter Conrad

Mon 14 Nov 2022 

Movie stars, bemused by their own magnified faces, don’t usually have much interest in self-analysis. Paul Newman turns out to be the ruthlessly candid exception. In the late 1980s, between beery binges, Newman recorded endless hours of reminiscences, trying finally to understand the insecure, inadequate stranger who skulked behind his handsome facade. Probably alarmed by what he’d revealed, he later destroyed the tapes. But after his death in 2008, 14,000 pages of transcripts were discovered in his musty Connecticut basement and in a storage locker; these have now been cut and pasted into an autobiography, supplemented by contributions from colleagues and family members. The result is startling: Narcissus breaks the mirror, leaving only some cruelly jagged shards.

Paris Hilton / The Memoir review – how a celebrity nymph conquered the Earth

 

Paris Hilton

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Paris: The Memoir review – how a celebrity nymph conquered the Earth

This article is more than 2 years old

With its dizzying spirituality and devotion to ‘sacred’ skincare, Paris Hilton’s memoir exposes a culture in which the self only exists if validated by a selfie

Peter Conrad

Mon 20 Mar 2023

Twenty years ago, Paris Hilton was the stiletto-heeled embodiment of the zeitgeist. With a chihuahua called Diamond Baby kennelled in her designer handbag, this nepotistic partygoer juggled five mobile phones while cantering across continents to sell branded merchandise to the fans she smarmily addresses as “my Little Hiltons”. Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence.