outsider

How and why did Katherine Mansfield provoke such violent extremes of admiration and hostility, both during her life and after it? Fifty years after her death, the BBC television series A Picture of Katherine Mansfield gave a fair example of her reputation in 1973. Tall, intense Vanessa Redgrave played Mansfield; short, baffled Annette Crosbie her devoted dogsbody friend Ida Baker (known as LM), with Jeremy Brett as Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry taking off his glasses whenever he had to express emotional…

One afternoon a few years ago, Cate Le Bon opened an email that made her shake. Before she knew what was happening, she was crying. “It isn’t like me to have that kind of reaction to something,” she says. Its message was simple: “John Cale is looking for you.”Le Bon was raised 30 miles or so from Cale’s home village of Garnant in Carmarthenshire, but the invitation to play with his band at the Barbican in London during the spring of 2018 reached her at a furniture-making school in the Lake District, where she was studying…

The director is all wrong. Just as you wouldn’t call on Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about Monet and his waterlilies, Lasse Hallström is a perplexing choice for a biopic about the Swedish outsider artist Hilma af Klint. Hallström is the soft-centred director of sweet-natured heart-tuggers such as Chocolat and A Dog’s Purpose. Af Klint was completely unknown when she died in 1944, and is now finally getting the recognition she deserves; Tate Modern in London is staging an exhibition of her mystical abstract canvases…

First, some introductions. Cosey Fanni Tutti – her name is a pun on the borderline misogynist Mozart opera Così fan tutte (literally “that’s what women do”) – is a multimedia artist who first made her reputation as part of 1970s art collective COUM Transmissions and their sonic heirs, Throbbing Gristle. Her 2017 memoir, Art Sex Music, was as shocking as it was celebrated, recounting a lifetime of challenging the mainstream through industrial music and eyebrow-raising art. It also laid horribly bare how abusive and…