Lucian freud

Friday

Robin Simon

The art of resurrecting forgotten artists

A retired priest in North Wales once told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to buy 19th-century paintings for the holiday-camp chapels, because they were going cheap. One he bought, for 49 guineas in 1947, was William Dyce’s 1835 “Lamentation of the Dead Christ.” In 1983, after the Butlin’s chapels had closed, it made a handy £125,000 at auction, when it was bought by Aberdeen Art Gallery. As late as 1962, Lord Leighton’s great “Flaming June” (1895) was sold for £50. Today? Millions. Talk about “the bubble reputation.” The pattern of artistic fame followed by subsequent obscurity has been repeated through the centuries.

Tuesday

D.J. Taylor

Finding the Lost Girls

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Encapsulations of a particular art-world demographic nearly always fall wide of the mark. Just as there were plenty of people on hand in the 1950s to protest that the Angry Young Men were neither especially angry nor exclusively male, so countless chroniclers of interwar social life complained that the Bright Young People were neither bright nor young. But the critic Peter Quennell’s phrase ‘Lost Girls’ to describe the gang of female twenty-somethings who worked on the magazines and populated the parties of Blitz-era literary London carries an unmistakable tang of conviction.

lost girls