Between 2007 and 2010 Colm Tóibín was art critic for the UK edition of Esquire magazine. These are his columns as they appeared.
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Andy Warhol
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 Every night now before I go to sleep I read deeply in Andy Warhol’s diaries. It is lovely being in the company of one of the silliest people who has ever lived; it is lovely also hearing about Warhol’s outings every evening in a New York he made his own,…
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Anish Kapoor
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 Anish Kapoor creates odd shapes that seem unafraid of their own mystery, or at times of their own perfection. He is not an artist who seeks to make the world in his own likeness. Rather he is someone who becomes excited by what happens if the ego is stripped away…
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Ron Arad
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 One of the great moments when the distinguished history of British snobbery met the limited world of British design was when Alan Clarke declared of Michael Heseltine that he was the sort of person who had bought his own furniture. Clarke, we presume, had inherited his stuff. For us mere…
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Baselitz
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 Some painters have all the luck. They invent or stumble across a style or a signature gesture early in their careers and then spend their lives refining it and playing with it. They make their best paintings when they struggle most to avoid self-parody and attempt to surprise themselves. There…
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Beuys
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 It is hard to know who to love, or who to stay with. It is clear that the government or the BBC or someone in authority should help. In the absence of this, a simple rule of thumb is to ask everyone six questions and then decide whether you…
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Bridget Riley
Published: Esquire Art 2007 – 2010 Beauty. Subtlety. Repetition. Mystery. Delicacy.Serious. Cerebral. Unchanging. Determined. Mesmerising.There are really only a few living artists whose work these five nouns and five adjectives could describe. They would help us perhaps identify the American artist Vija Celmins who has worked mainly at making images of the sea and the sky,…