obituary
mark.hudson
Alan Davie, who died on Saturday aged 93, was one of the great 20th-century British artists, a life-long maverick whose explosive canvases cut a swathe through the provincial aridity of the postwar art scene. The first British – probably the first European – artist to become aware of Pollock’s innovations and take on the challenge of “action painting”, the quietly spoken but formidable Scot forged his own expressive path that was less an imitation of Pollock more, as fellow artist Peter Doig put it recently, “like an expanded Paul Klee… but much more physical, much more visceral.”At the time Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The news that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died at the age of only 46 robs cinema of - almost unarguably - the greatest screen actor of the age, and certainly its outstanding character actor. Where once there was Charles Laughton, or Ernest Borgnine, for the past two decades there has been Philip Seymour Hoffman. They are all great film actors whom fate has fashioned in doughy clumps of misshapen flesh. The matinee idols got the looks and the girls: the character actors got the meatiest roles and the longevity. His death deprives all lovers of cinema of a longer career that would undoubtedly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
On screen, Philip Seymour Hoffman will be forever immortalised as the Oscar-winning star of Capote who was both a darling of the indie film world (think Todd Solondz and the Coen Brothers) and an invaluable supporting player in such mainstream fare as Moneyball, Charlie Wilson's War, and the Hunger Games franchise. But the shock waves currently being felt at the news of his death are likely to be intensified in New York, the city where he was found dead and where Hoffman first came to attention as the formidable theatre talent that he remained through to his last Broadway stage role - as Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Pete Seeger has had a vast number of tributes since he died aged 94 on Monday. That might seem surprising for an artist whose real heyday was over 50 years ago. Part of the reason no doubt was the dignified and steadfast aura of a man of the people and heartfelt activist. Along with his friend Woody Guthrie, he ushered in a period in American music when after the initial flush of rock'n'roll had subsided it became interesting to sing pop songs that were not mere romantic slush, but often had a political message. His mission was also to re-imagine the folk music of the steppes of America. Read more ...
theartsdesk
“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies supremely well to Claudio Abbado, who has died at the age of 80.Having undergone radical surgery for stomach cancer in 2000, Abbado not only lived to tell the tale but went on to what he, the most modest and objective of men, would have been the first to admit were even greater heights and depths. No one would have thought he could do better than with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Coleman never said, "Juantorena opens his legs and shows his class," any more than Queen Victoria said, "We are not amused." The words belonged to Ron Pickering, but Private Eye got it wrong. The chances are that Coleman, who has died at the age of 87, was not amused. A lot of people were, however. Who knows how much damage that one mis-attribution did, how much it contributed to the image crisis that Coleman put up with for so many years?Undeservedly or not, it is the lot of the British sports commentator to suffer the barbs and carping of his or her public. Some of them, and Coleman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Perhaps 20 people in thick puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouched behind a wooden sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it its modern name. The north coast of Kent glittered in the sun. Across the Medway you could see the contours of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbled to his mark on the other side of the sea-wall. He was on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas tumble. When the first AD called “Action!”, Peter O’Toole began to play out his last scene on the last day of Read more ...
jillian.edelstein
In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The photographs were taken in the presidential house, the former seat of the oppressors. It felt very surreal for me because even the décor was Cape Dutch furniture. It was not what you might imagine for a black president.I had already been told that I was not allowed any flash because his retinas had been damaged by his work on the limestone quarry, chiselling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee during the war, then left for London, became a single mother with a third young child, and had her lifelong battles with her own mother. Much of it is recorded in the Children of Violence tetralogy about her literary alter-ego Martha Quest. And then there are Lessing’s memoirs, which took the reader up to 1962, just short of the publication of The Golden Notebook. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We had heard he was ill, and had a recent liver transplant, but then he always seemed to be off colour. When Lester Bangs interviewed him in 1973 for Let It Rock he seemed ill then. When Bangs met him he had just had his greatest hit album Transformer, and seemed to be immediately blowing his new-found fame. Bangs talked of a “vaguely unpleasant fat man” who said "I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room." But if rock music from the time of Elvis’ first records was a religion with Elvis a Messiah, Lou Reed became a High Priest. In the late sixties, Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...