Art school

The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical

From our UK edition

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent times. She’s credited with anticipating Angela Carter and for being in the vanguard of tackling themes of traumatic dissociation and the realities of childbirth. Yet younger, trendier writers have regularly eclipsed her. Aged 29, Barbara was broke: a single mother who’d weathered affairs, an abortion and a suicide attempt Every fan remembers their first Comyns novel: the visceral jolt of black humour, the suckerpunch of stark horror. Knowing that she drew from life, we have longed for a biography, and hooray, it’s finally here.

Inside the traditional art revolution

More and more often lately, people are rejecting tired modern art. They often find solace in the art of the past; online accounts admiring “traditional art” have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, but they act as online repositories for a bittersweet recognition: what once was, no longer is. But the kind of art they seek, involving detail, meaning and skill, still exists, and it is growing. The cultural hegemony of contemporary, abstract art is slowly beginning to crack; through those cracks we can see new art surfacing. As I have become increasingly disillusioned with the state of politics, an observation from Ernst Jünger, the German philosopher and skeptic of the extreme politics of his day, rings true to me.

art revolution Milano Painting Academy