The Mirror And The Palette
Jennifer Higgie W&N £20
Picture the face of an old master or modern painter. What springs to mind? Rembrandt’s jowls? Van Gogh’s eyes? Chances are that the face isn’t female, claims art historian Jennifer Higgie.
Frida Kahlo is perhaps the only woman painter whose features have lodged in the public consciousness. But with this new book, a fascinating survey of women’s self-portraits from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, Higgie aims to redress the balance.
Over the years, Higgie claims, the female artist has been cast as ‘a seductress, a changeling, a visionary, a man-hater, a freak; she’s never considered normal’. Countering those salacious labels, she instead presents various figures – British, American, European – as persuasive talents dedicated to, and suffering for, their art.
Frida Kahlo (above) is perhaps the only woman painter whose features have lodged in the public consciousness. But with this new book Jennifer Higgie aims to redress the balance
In addition to Kahlo, they include Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th Century painter who prevailed over the brutality of men to paint herself tousle-haired, dynamically wielding her brush; and Sofonisba Anguissola, another Italian, who created a disorientating meta-self-portrait in 1559 when she painted her teacher finishing a portrait of her.
And then there was Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a favourite of Marie Antoinette, who caused a scandal by painting herself smiling (well, she had just escaped the guillotine).
Potted biographies of the artists are combined with insights into how their self-portraits signal these narratives. There are some extraordinary details. During the Second World War, the ageing Finnish modernist Helene Schjerfbeck checked in to a grand hotel near Stockholm and began obsessively painting herself.
‘She depicts herself as an apparition,’ Higgie writes. ‘These are frightening paintings; she already looks dead.’
It is perhaps Leonora Carrington, the English debutante turned Surrealist, who best captures the lively spirit of this book. Her dreamlike 1938 self-portrait included a hovering rocking horse and a lactating hyena.
‘I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,’ Carrington once recalled. ‘I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.’
Blood Gun Money
Ioan Grillo Bloomsbury £14.99
Rating: 
You may remember that back in 2018 President Trump made a speech referencing an unnamed London hospital which, he claimed, was filled with stabbing victims and had so much blood on the floors that it was ‘as bad as a military war zone hospital’.
As it happens, 2018 did witness a 13-year high for murders in London, bringing the capital’s homicide rate up to 1.5 per 100,000.
But compare that to the murder rate in the American city of Baltimore, which in the same year stood at 50 per 100,000, a figure 33 times higher. The difference, of course, is that most of those killings were carried out with guns, not knives, but that’s something the American gun lobby would prefer us not to think about.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), as Ioan Grillo suggests in this powerful and chilling book about the firearms pandemic, may be the most influential lobbying group in the world
Trump’s speech was delivered to the National Rifle Association (NRA) which, as Ioan Grillo suggests in this powerful and chilling book about the firearms pandemic, may be the most influential lobbying group in the world.
The right to bear arms is hard-wired into the American psyche, but since the 1970s the NRA has been agitating tirelessly against any legislation that aims to restrict the ability of Americans to buy as many and as lethal weapons as they wish.
The NRA’s stance is steeped in the rhetoric of liberty, but as Grillo explains in grim detail, the main beneficiaries are criminals south of the border. Mexican cartels flood the United States with drugs, and they use some of their profits to purchase an ‘iron river’ of guns, which in turn fuels escalating cycles of violence.
These guns are easily acquired, the nominal paperwork can be skipped by using a third party, or ‘straw’ purchaser, and if you buy from a private seller no questions are asked.
There are signs that the NRA is losing traction in Washington, and the situation may improve in the future. But as Grillo warns, ‘perhaps there is worse to come first’.
Simon Griffith