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"No prose interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult enough."

Robert Graves and Laura Riding, "William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling"

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Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Four Yellow Lines, 1933

The Piet Mondrian/Hilma af Klint show at the Tate is too busy and too hot and too tiring. af Klint's diagrammatic insistence on Something Beyond is tiring, and besides them Mondrian's pastelly cubist trees are tiring, and the way in an early room there are pictures by each called Evolution and that's meant to prove they had lots in common is tiring, and there'a s room full of drawings and notebooks and vitrines which is tiring and you wish there was a bench and a toilet and a bed. But then as you leave you see, hung high, Mondrian's Lozenge, and you feel faintly through your tiredness a faint glimmer of recognition, as you realise that Mondrian, like af Klimt, is asking you to believe in, no, he is demonstrating the existence of Something Beyond the Visible, and the thing that is Beyond the Visible is God, and it is Mondrian's version of God, which is to say, it is the Right Angle.

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Philip IV of Spain, Velazquez, c. 1656

When all you are doing in front of a painting is confirming your view of it, it’s time to take a rest.

T.J. Clark, “If These Apples Should Fall”

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Walter Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, 1915

"With Sickert ... even when his pictures are not so good there is an underlying drawing there that keeps them at a certain level." --Lucian Freud (in "Man with a Blue Scarf")

"Sickert sees like a draughtsman, and then builds a painting round his drawing.... Seeing comes first, paint comes after.... Sickert, for all his French training, painted as Legros accused all English artists of painting, by making a drawing and filling it in." --David Sylvester

Sylvester refers to this picture as "The Rehearsal, Brighton", but the Tate (which bought it in 1996) calls it "Brighton Pierrots" and gives it a wall text suggesting the empty deckchairs could be a symbol for the missing of the First World War. If it depicts a rehearsal then the empty chairs are meaningless, just a visual fact. Is the picture’s new name so it can have a more poignant meaning attached to it?

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Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983

Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 1826

Mainly clear enough, but where is this Fury coming from? Is it the meeting of Ingres’ rocks? And, after all, what a strange meeting it is...

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1888

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Felix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein, 1907 Ingres, Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, 1832

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Lucian Freud, Large Interior, Notting Hill, 1998

"... the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child."

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“Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn’t like the ends...)”

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The Insufferable Gaucho

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Waiting for Godot (1955), On the Road (1957)

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“It has never been possible for him to bring his career to an end, and even, and particularly, to go out in a blaze of glory, because going out in a blaze of glory is still ending the legend: to brandish the World Cup is to accept death, while a bad ending leaves perspectives open, unknown and alive.”

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, "Zidane's Melancholy"

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...why is it that with two exceptions - Les Carabiniers and Une Femme Mariée - the music in your films is deliberately "film music"?

Because I have no ideas about music. I have always asked for more or less the same music from different composers. They all wrote very similar music, more or less, and I always asked in general for what is known as "film music".

If one listened to it without seeing the film...

It would be worthless.

--JLG interviewed in Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1965

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The Queen of Spades

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He was radical, brilliant, but also "a great poseur," feckless, improvident, and prone to "nerve storms": the type of individual that looks if not to poetry, then to some other reevaluative hierarchy to adjust his low standing, his perceived lack of usefulness, his reversed poles.

Michael Hofmann on Basil Bunting