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Julian Bell

Julian Bell is the author of Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, which came out last month.

From the London Review dated 3 January 2008

Bon Viveur in Cuban Heels

  • A Life of Picasso, Vol. III: The Triumphant Years 1917-32 by John Richardson  Buy this book

‘To my amazement, there were no paintings . . . but only packages, piled one atop another to the height, say, of Picasso . . . And do you know what there was inside? Banknotes! Yes, sir, banknotes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

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In the LRB archive

Bon Viveur in Cuban Heels · 3 January 2008

  • A Life of Picasso, Vol. III: The Triumphant Years 1917-32 by John Richardson  Buy this book

subscriber-only content At Tate Britain: Julian Bell on John Everett Millais · 15 November 2007

subscriber-only content Eye Candy · 19 July 2007

subscriber-only content I’m not upset. It’s nerves · 23 February 2006

  • Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse Vol. II The Conquest of Colour 1909-54 by Hilary Spurling  Buy this book

subscriber-only content I do like painting · 2 December 2004

subscriber-only content Into the Southern Playground · 21 August 2003

  • 'The Quattro Cento’ and ‘Stones of Rimini’ by Adrian Stokes
  • Art and Its Discontents by Richard Read

subscriber-only content Eyeballs v. Optics · 13 December 2001

  • Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters by David Hockney

So South Kensington · 20 September 2001

  • The Complete Writings on Art by Walter Sickert, edited by Anna Gruetzner Robins

subscriber-only content Get out · 19 October 2000

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Unreal Food Uneaten · 13 April 2000

  • The Art of Bloomsbury edited by Richard Shone
  • First Friends by Ronald Blythe
  • Bloomsbury in France by Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright

 not available in archive ‘What are you doing staring at that fake from Aix?’ · 15 July 1999

  • Rembrandt by Himself edited by Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot
  • Rembrandt : The Painter at Work by Ernst van de Wetering

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