Happy Birthday! Born in Salt Lake City on 4 August 1945, Paul McCarthy has spent more than half a century forcing America to look at what it would rather conceal. Trained as a painter, he soon abandoned the limits of the canvas. In the 1970s, the bo
This an artist I deeply admire. Born in Karachi in 1962, Huma Bhabha arrived in the United States in 1981 to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, later at Columbia. She lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. For three decades she has buil
In the latest episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, I speak with Jérôme Pantalacci @pantalaccijerome founder and director of Art-o-rama @artorama_marseille in Marseille. At the end of August, I will travel to Marseille for the fair and
Willem de Kooning’s East Hampton studio was not designed to turn the artist into a myth. It was a place built around light, scale and the physical demands of painting. In the early 1960s, Willem and Elaine de Kooning settled in East Hampton, a
Thierry Gillier @thierrygillierzadig exchanged the white expanses of his former home in Paris’s 16th arrondissement for something altogether denser: a late-17th-century residence on rue de Verneuil, originally built for the Marquis d’Aub
The house on Hydra tends to get filed under Brice Marden’s name. Helen Marden found the Greek island first. She came in 1970 and brought Brice back the following summer. In 1973 they bought a modest place high above the port, reached by the ki
Christie’s took $1.45 billion across its marquee week in New York this May, the strongest May in the house’s history, and the number was around the trade press before the room had emptied. What travelled with it was no account of where th
”Bacon had talked of making sculptures as early as 1966, but realised he could ‘do them much better in paint... It would be a kind of structured painting in which images, as it were, would arise from a river of flesh.’ His descripti
I just love Tracey Emin’s work so much. She now divides her own work into before and after. The Tate Modern exhibition closing on 31 August takes its title, A Second Life, from that split, and it is the best exhibition I have seen in years. T
I love this Parisian pied-à-terre by @luislaplace, an interior that shows how restraint can give a collection greater presence. Warm oak panelling grounds the rooms, richly veined marble brings movement, and soft rugs and upholstery keep the a
Villa Santo Sospir was built in 1930 and bought in 1948 by Alec and Francine Weisweiller, who handed the interiors to Madeleine Castaing. Castaing furnished it as a summer house in bamboo and wicker, and because it was only ever meant for summers she
On Swiss National Day, ten Swiss artists I love. As one can see, there is no national style, and most of them worked elsewhere. Celebrating my birth country. 1–2 · ALBERTO GIACOMETTI After 1945 the figures narrowed to almost nothing. L&
Luca Bombassei lives on the upper piano nobile of Palazzo Contarini Corfù, a 15th-century palace on the Grand Canal. Nearly 6,500 square feet. Working with Venice’s heritage authorities, the architect took out later partitions and reope
RADICAL ROOMS The invitation was a drawing of a yawning dinosaur under a lightning storm. It went out in Milan in September 1981, for a show at a furniture showroom called Arc ’74 during the Salone del Mobile. Around two thousand people came.
The Bass House was never conceived as a neutral container for art. Architecture, furniture and collection were planned as a single environment. Commissioned by collectors and philanthropists Anne and Sid Bass in 1970 and completed in 1976, Paul Rudo
What is often described as Carlo Mollino’s Turin home was never really a home. Between 1960 and 1968, Mollino transformed the first floor of Villa Avondo, an 1888 building overlooking the River Po, into one of the most enigmatic interiors of t
LOVEABLE ARTWORK SERIES: Cecily Brown, The Triumph of Death, 2019. Oil on linen, in four parts, 535.94 × 535.94 cm. “Through the act of painting, [Brown] transforms the scene into a lively ballet, a joyful, macabre dance.” Sylvain
The art world keeps confusing retrenchment with death. Adam Lindemann’s @adamlindemann1 mega-gallery column for @artnet has been rattling around my head since it ran. He’s right that the obituaries are premature, but I think the luxury-v