In his essay “Carving and Modelling”, the now rather unfashionable, psychoanalytically inclined art critic Adrian Stokes wrote: “Carving creates a face for the stone, as agriculture for the earth, as man for woman. Modelling is more purely plastic creation: it makes things, it does not disclose, as a face, the significance of what already exists.” Stone, he suggests, “is the symbol of the outwardness, of the hoarded store of meaning [...]

In The Songlines, his remarkable book about the ancient, invisible pathways criss-crossing Australia that carry hymns to the land’s creation, the late Bruce Chatwin wrote that by “singing the word into existence . . . the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poiesis, meaning ‘creation’.

No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to [...]

Diane ArbusTimothy Taylor Gallery, London W1

“I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” Diane Arbus’s photographs of people, many of whom were on the margins of life, were rooted in an understanding of the relationship between photographer and subject. Attuned to the small tragedies of contemporary life, she was to photography what Raymond Carver was to literature. As John Szarkowski, organiser of [...]

In the late 1960s the American fine art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “anxious object” to describe works that deliberately seemed to undermine their own status as art – such as Andy Warhol’s pictures of soup tins and Brillo boxes. Ambiguity by its nature unsettles, which explains its appeal both to the Romantics and the avant-garde. Freed from any functional use, objects become unstable – instead of anchoring us [...]

In 1976, the late film-maker Stanley Kubrick travelled to New York to try to interest the Jewish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer in writing an original screenplay for a project on which he was working, about the Holocaust. Not a Holocaust survivor himself, Singer declined, saying he did not know the first thing about it.

The project was shelved until Kubrick read Louis Begley's short novel Wartime Lies, about a young [...]

The modernist American poet William Carlos Williams declared in his poem "A Sort of Song" that there were "no ideas but in things". Such a phrase might well describe the output of the late Prunella Clough. She was essentially a painter of landscape and still life, and though in later life her work hovered close to abstraction it was always rooted in the minutiae of the observed world. In the [...]

Sam Taylor-Wood, now a fixture at glamorous London art-world parties, came from humble beginnings. She grew up on a Peabody estate and then a hippie commune in Crowborough, East Sussex, where the inhabitants wore orange robes and the cats ate out of the chip pan. Her biker father abandoned her mother, who disappeared shortly afterwards; Taylor-Wood glimpsed her in a house down the road, and only then realised she had [...]

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint . . . the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

This famed description from the beginning of Conrad's Heart [...]

With his pimento-shaped face, reminiscent of an overstuffed hamster, Francis Bacon appears in photos taken by his contemporaries and in a famous portrait by his friend Lucian Freud - stolen in 1988 never to be seen again - as one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century. Doyen of Soho drinking clubs, he led a reprobate life that has been well documented, from an Anglo-Irish childhood, with a [...]

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton wrote about the linguistic similarity between Samuel Beckett and Theodor Adorno. "What is most drastically impoverished in Beckett is language itself," he wrote. "Adorno's style reveals a similar austerity as each phrase is forced to work overtime to earn its keep . . . Like Beckett's, Adorno's is a language rammed up against silence, a set of guerrilla [...]