Greetings everyone!
Although our ‘in-person’ book club is no longer running, I just wanted to recommend two rather fabulous – and very different – books that might be of interest to the readers in our Art, Books and Culture groups.
The first speaks very directly to our previous discussions on the art of Stanley Spencer. By Nicola Upson, “Stanley and Elsie” (Duckworth books, 2019) is a fictional ‘reconstruction’ of Stanley and Hilda Spencer’s marriage, the painting of the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the bizarre situation into which Stanley plunged them all by his infatuation with Patricia Preece. Brilliantly insightful in terms both of recreating the complex situation and understanding the artworks of Stanley, Hilda and Patricia (although in her case we should actually say Dorothy Hepworth of course), our perspective is that of housemaid Elsie Munday (who I’d thought was a fictional character but, again, is actually based on a real person). Completely absorbing!
For those who love their crime/ thrillers, Yulia Yakovleva‘s “Punishment of a Hunter” (2021, Pushkin Vertigo, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp) is absolutely fantastic. We’re in 1930s Soviet Leningrad as Detective Vasily Zaitsev finds himself investigating a series of strangely theatrical murders. Zaitsev is a wonderfully sympathetic character, and this is the first in a ‘retro-detective’ series by Yakovleva, a Russian writer now living in Oslo whose love of St Petersburg, it’s people and culture shines through every page. So what have the murders to do with the ballet? art? the political machinations of the Soviet state? Read on, you’ll be utterly engrossed!
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On the not-yet-read pile:
The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes [February 2024, Orion]: 1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together.
The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger [July 2024; Bloomsbury]: Dora Maar, ‘The Weeping Woman’ of Picasso’s famous paintings, steps out of the canvas in Louisa Treger’s unforgettable new novel.
Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair [April 2024: Cheerio]: [We follow] in the footsteps of photographer John Deakin, whose chronicles of Soho life – and the world of Francis Bacon and his friends – have so influenced our perception of that generation’s work.
And a couple of interesting-looking exhibition catalogues:
The Modernism in Ukraine exhibition opens at the Royal Academy, London on 29th June: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/eye-of-the-storm
and the Harlem Renaissance exhibition is at The Met in New York until 28th July: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-harlem-renaissance-and-transatlantic-modernism
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thecommonviewer 