Modernism
The uprising against ugly cities
Arriving in Oslo, the Barcode District is unavoidable. It is so named because its blocks are laid out like dominos…
The British modernist who was airbrushed from history
Elsewhere in British music in 1960: William Walton was writing his Symphony No 2, Benjamin Britten his opera on Midsummer…
How Ulysses horrified the stuffed shirts of New York’s literary establishment
The magazine editor Margaret C. Anderson’s spirited attempts to introduce Joyce’s masterpiece to 1920s America resulted in a court case and heavy fine for disseminating obscenity
The joy of Paul Taylor
When the American choreographer Paul Taylor died at the age of 88 in 2018, he should have been consecrated a…
The Two Roberts drank, danced, fought – but how good was their art?
The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in…
The triumph of classical architecture
It is very hard to imagine the University of Oxford ever constructing a modernist building again. This is the significance…
Picasso’s ravishing work for the ballet
Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new storehouse in Stratford’s Olympic Park are being enthralled by an atmospherically lit…
The two young women who blazed a trail for modernism in Ireland
In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in…
The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener’ who maintained a private militia
Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who…
Was Sir John Soane one of the first modernists?
Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to…
The liberating force of musical modernism
It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very…
Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?
A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they…
The architectural provocations of I.M. Pei
When first considering architects for the new Louvre in 1981, Emile Biasini, the project’s head, liked that I.M. Pei was…
Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama
George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly…
The Stockhausen work that is worth braving
Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve…
I’m not convinced Thomas Heatherwick is the best person to be discussing boring buildings
Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual…
In search of utopia: Chevengur, by Andrey Platonov, reviewed
After crossing the vast steppe, Sasha Dvanov reaches an isolated town where the communist ideal appears to have been achieved. But at what cost?
The house that Rach built
Fast cars, minimalist design and en suite bathrooms: Richard Bratby visits the composer’s starkly modern Swiss home
The artist’s artist
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
Lend me your ears
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
Shaw thing
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
The beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
The cowpat myth
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
