Matthew Holman – författare

One of Britain’s most influential living artists, Le Brun emerged as a significant rising star in the British art scene during the 1980s and continues to create works that are a celebration of light, depth, and the expressive potential of paint. This book presents an in-depth exploration of a discrete and compelling body of work over the past ten years.Le Brun’s large-scale paintings are characterized by their lyrical abstraction and often reference myth, history, and literature using a rich palette and expressive brushwork. Each page of this sumptuous book reveals the artist’s dynamic use of color, texture, and form, capturing the essence of his creative process and the emotions embedded in his canvases, some light in touch and some involving dense accretions of paint.Featuring an extensive plates section of full-color reproductions, including five expanding foldouts, a critical narrative by art historian Matthew Holman, and a reference section of illustrated footnotes that shed light on Le Brun’s inspirations, this book provides a comprehensive look at one of Britain’s most beloved artists.

This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and abroad.Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ‘Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet’. However, in the half a century since, O’Hara’s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Larry Rivers, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O’Hara’s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.It focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA’s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from Madrid to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo.Bringing together close readings of O’Hara’s poems and unpublished letters with a selection of archival illustrations, Holman argues for O’Hara’s sense of exuberant continuity between life as a writer and a curator, an American and a cosmopolitan – revealing that he was so much more besides the quintessential New York poet. It is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies, or simply this lesser known but fascinating aspect of the legendary poet’s career.

This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O''Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and abroad.Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ''Frank O''Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet''. However, in the half a century since, O''Hara''s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Larry Rivers, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O''Hara''s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.It focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA''s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from Madrid to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo.Bringing together close readings of O''Hara''s poems and unpublished letters with a selection of archival illustrations, Holman argues for O''Hara''s sense of exuberant continuity between life as a writer and a curator, an American and a cosmopolitan – revealing that he was so much more besides the quintessential New York poet. It is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies, or simply this lesser known but fascinating aspect of the legendary poet''s career.

This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O''Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and abroad.Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ''Frank O''Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet''. However, in the half a century since, O''Hara''s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Larry Rivers, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O''Hara''s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.It focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA''s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from Madrid to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo.Bringing together close readings of O''Hara''s poems and unpublished letters with a selection of archival illustrations, Holman argues for O''Hara''s sense of exuberant continuity between life as a writer and a curator, an American and a cosmopolitan – revealing that he was so much more besides the quintessential New York poet. It is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies, or simply this lesser known but fascinating aspect of the legendary poet''s career.

This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and abroad.Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ‘Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet’. However, in the half a century since, O’Hara’s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Larry Rivers, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O’Hara’s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.It focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA’s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from Madrid to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo.Bringing together close readings of O’Hara’s poems and unpublished letters with a selection of archival illustrations, Holman argues for O’Hara’s sense of exuberant continuity between life as a writer and a curator, an American and a cosmopolitan – revealing that he was so much more besides the quintessential New York poet. It is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies, or simply this lesser known but fascinating aspect of the legendary poet’s career.

Cases of citation presents a history of artists who incorporated literary references into their work from the 1960s onwards.Through a series of object-focused chapters that each take up a singular ‘case of citation’, the collection considers how literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy for artists during this period. It surveys nine artworks by a diverse group of artists – including David Wojnarowicz, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski – whose citations draw on literary works with authors ranging from Gertrude Stein to Jean Genet. The book also features an interview with pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek that discusses her career-long commitment to working with text. Together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art.

Cases of citation presents a history of artists who incorporated literary references into their work from the 1960s onwards.Through a series of object-focused chapters that each take up a singular ‘case of citation’, the collection considers how literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy for artists during this period. It surveys nine artworks by a diverse group of artists – including David Wojnarowicz, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski – whose citations draw on literary works with authors ranging from Gertrude Stein to Jean Genet. The book also features an interview with pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek that discusses her career-long commitment to working with text. Together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art.

Gideon Rubin (b. 1973, Israel) is an artist who lives and works in London. Exploring identity, history and the inheritance of trauma in his enigmatic paintings, Rubin’s subject matter draws on myriad references such as film, popular culture, art history and literature, creating and investigating mythologies from the recent past. Haunting and subtly theatrical, the paintings often feature faceless yet familiar figures. Underlying each work is Rubin’s expressive mark-making, muted palette and understated use of negative space and raw canvas. _Look Again_ is Gideon Rubin’s second major trade monograph and showcases his substantial body of work since 2015, including studies of people in nature and scenes of solitude and intimacy. Author and art critic Jennifer Higgie discusses the evolution of his artistic style and his many influences—Balthus, De Kooning, Guston and Diebenkorn to name a few. Dr Matthew Holman’s expansive essay touches on Rubin’s cinematic characters, source material, his use of artistic conventions and engagement with sexuality. Holman investigates the meaning of redaction in Rubin’s work, both in his faceless portraits and in Black Book—a work in which Rubin used black paint to erase the contents of a 1938 English translation of Mein Kampf.Exhibited at the Freud Museum in London in 2018, Black Book is an exploration of what is left out of history, as much as what is remembered.Painting is essential to Rubin, as both a creative and therapeutic act; ‘a log keeping him afloat in the middle of the sea’, as he puts it. In conversation with fellow artist Varda Caivano, Rubin analyses his motivations, processes and doubts, and explains his surprising route to painting. Despite coming from a lineage of painters on his father’s side, it was largely his mother’s academic love of art that galvanised his artistic career, as well as a transformational experience in South America that opened him up to painting. An emotive poem by South Korean author Park Joon sheds further light on Rubin’s imagination.Rubin studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and then at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. He has had numerous international one-man shows and his works are included in a number of international private and public collections. Recent exhibitions include 13, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan (2023), Dark Noise, The Kupferman House Collection, Israel (2023), Portrait without a Face, Fox Jensen Gallery, Tokyo (2023), a solo show at CASSIUS&Co., London (2023) and Living Memory, a two-person show with Louise Bourgeois in a Grade II listed chapel in London (2023). Rubin’s work has been featured in publications such as _Artribune_, _San Francisco Examiner, Vestoj, Koln Kultur, Galerie Magazine, Südostschweiz Newspaper_ and _Elephant_ among others. The publication has been supported by Galerie Karsten Greve, who represent Rubin’s work in Paris, Cologne and St. Moritz.

This new monograph, dedicated to the work of Oxford-based artist, Tom de Freston, features paintings and works on paper from his technically ambitious and visually arresting Poiesis series (2023–25).The works gathered under Poiesis have emerged from an intensely personal passage of time. After a pregnancy loss in 2020 and six subsequent miscarriages, de Freston and his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, welcomed their daughter in 2023. de Freston’s works hold the doubleness of these experiences: devastation and tenderness, fear and hope, the body as site of both loss and miraculous return. de Freston’s artworks, at once mythic and raw, are elegies and odes to the grief of losing a child, the resilience of love and the wonder of parenthood.de Freston stages the figures that inhabit Poiesis within unstable, porous spaces: grids suggesting architecture or containment, landscapes opening onto darkness, interiors charged with memory. The central figure in many of the paintings is a pregnant woman, often faceless and turned away from the viewer, with arms reaching forward – action accompanied by afterimage. Washes of colour in an ethereal, dreamlike palette – characterised by watery-white blues, vibrant purples, soft yellows and thinned-blood pink – bloom and bleed into one another, suggesting emotional overflow, while scraped, layered textures further the processes of abstraction and emergence.For more than sixteen years, de Freston has painted his wife. Millwood Hargrave appears as Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Eurydice; figures drawn from literature and myth yet always tethered to lived experience. These paintings are inseparable from the couple’s long-standing collaborations in numerous artistic forms. Many of the Poiesis works echo uncannily with lines from Millwood Hargrave’s Eurydice poems from 2014–16, composed through their collaborative multimedia work Orpheus and Eurydice. Following the publication of Strange Bodies (Granta, 2023), in which he grappled with these experiences in dialogue with other artistic figures, most notably Titian, whose Poesie paintings form a central inspiration, de Freston’s work now exists in a genuinely hybrid form.This monograph, the second published by Anomie Publishing, London, on de Freston’s work (I Saw This, 2023), presents newly commissioned texts by Professor Caroline Vout and gallerist Varvara Roza, the instigators of his recent exhibitions at the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (2026) and Varvara Roza Galleries (2025) respectively. The publication has been designed by Joe Gilmore and its introductory texts are accompanied by an extended essay by art historian and writer, Matthew Holman, and an enlightening and intimate interview between de Freston and Millwood Hargrave.Published by Anomie Publishing, London, in association with the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Varvara Roza Galleries, London.