The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is a non-fiction book written by Olivia Laing. The book was first published by Picador in 2016 and, like Laing's previous works, it blends research, biography and memoir.
The majority of the research for the book took place when Laing was living alone in New York City after having been abruptly left by a partner. Her reflections on the isolation she felt during this time make their way into the book.
The book is divided into eight chapters, with each chapter beginning with Laing's experiences being alone in New York, before devolving into reflections on artists and the way in which loneliness permeated their work. In order, the artists discussed are:
The book was well-received, earning generally positive reviews. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.
Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
David Michael Wojnarowicz was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.
Josephine Verstille Hopper was an American painter who studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship. She was the wife of Edward Hopper, whom she married in 1924.
Basquiat is a 1996 American biographical drama film directed, written and co-composed by Julian Schnabel in his feature directorial debut. The film is based on the life of American postmodernist/neo expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is the first film about an American painter written and directed by another artist.
Solitude, also known as social withdrawal, is a state of seclusion or isolation, meaning lack of socialisation. Effects can be either positive or negative, depending on the situation. Short-term solitude is often valued as a time when one may work, think, or rest without disturbance. It may be desired for the sake of privacy. Long-term solitude may stem from soured relationships, loss of loved ones, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders such as circadian rhythm sleep disorder, or circumstances of employment or situation.
James Warhola is an American artist who has illustrated more than two dozen children's picture books since 1987.
Loneliness is an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation. Loneliness is also described as social pain – a psychological mechanism which motivates individuals to seek social connections. It is often associated with a perceived lack of connection and intimacy. Loneliness overlaps and yet is distinct from solitude. Solitude is simply the state of being apart from others; not everyone who experiences solitude feels lonely. As a subjective emotion, loneliness can be felt even when a person is surrounded by other people. Hence, there is a distinction between being alone and feeling lonely. Loneliness can be short term or long term. In either case, it can be intense and painful.
Nighthawks is a 1942 oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper that portrays four people in a downtown diner late at night as viewed through the diner's large glass window. The light coming from the diner illuminates a darkened and deserted urban streetscape.
Olivia De Berardinis, known professionally as Olivia, is an American artist who is famous for her paintings of women, often referred to as pinup or cheesecake art. She has been working in this genre since the mid-1970s, and became a contributor to Playboy in 1985 which ultimately led to her own monthly pinup page in the magazine.
Blue Movie is a 1969 American erotic film written, produced and directed by Andy Warhol. It is the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States, and is regarded as a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984), which, before the legalization of pornography in Denmark on July 1, 1969, started on June 12, 1969 with the release of Blue Movie at the Elgin Theater, and later, the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre, in New York City. Blue Movie helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon, in which porn was publicly discussed by celebrities and taken seriously by film critics, in modern American culture, and shortly thereafter, in many other countries throughout the world. According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris, an internationally controversial erotic drama film starring Marlon Brando and released a few years after Blue Movie was made. Viva and Louis Waldon, playing themselves, starred in Blue Movie.
Bomb is an American arts magazine edited by artists and writers, published quarterly in print and daily online. It is composed primarily of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines—visual art, literature, film, music, theater, architecture, and dance. In addition to interviews, Bomb publishes reviews of literature, film, and music, as well as new poetry and fiction. Bomb is published by New Art Publications, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by the American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.
Joseph Keckler is an American singer, musician, performing artist and writer. He writes and performs both absurdist operatic monologues and eerie, emotive ballads. He has also created videos and has authored numerous evening-length performance pieces. Keckler has been hailed as a "major vocal talent... with a trickster's dark humor" whose wide vocal range "shatters the conventional boundaries" by the New York Times, was once crowned "best downtown performance artist" in New York City by The Village Voice, and has been described as a subversive originator of "unnerving artistry" who "hardly seems human" in a 2019 review in The Observer.
Olivia Laing is a British writer, novelist and cultural critic. She is the author of four works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring,The Lonely City, and Everybody, as well as an essay collection, Funny Weather, and a novel, Crudo. In 2018, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and in 2019, the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crudo. In 2019 she became an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
New York Movie is an oil on canvas painting by American painter Edward Hopper. The painting was begun in December of 1938 and finished in January of 1939. Measuring 32 1/4 x 40 1/8", New York Movie depicts a nearly empty movie theater occupied with a few scattered moviegoers and a pensive usherette lost in her thoughts. Praised for its brilliant portrayal of multiple light sources, New York Movie is one of Hopper's well-regarded works. Despite the fact that the movie in the painting itself is not known, Hopper's wife and fellow painter Josephine Hopper wrote in her notes on New York Movie that the image represents fragments of snow-covered mountains.
Crudo is a 2018 novel by Olivia Laing. The book, Laing's first novel, incorporates autobiographical elements and details from the life of American author Kathy Acker. The novel was well-received, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award is given annually to two writers to support their work on a forthcoming book, either fiction or non-fiction, relating to the Americas. It is supported by the Hay Festival and the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies. The winners each receive £20,000, divided into four quarterly grants, and have a research residency at the Eccles Centre, with curatorial support, and opportunities to promote their work at Hay Festival events in the UK and elsewhere. The award was previously known as the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award and the Eccles British Library Writers Award.
Intermission is a 1963 painting by American realist Edward Hopper (1882–1967). It is a late period painting completed between March and April at his New York home and studio in Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, just four years before his death at age 84. The work depicts a woman in a theater wearing a blue and black dress and black shoes, sitting by herself in a green aisle seat near a blue wall below a balcony. It is one of the largest paintings ever completed by Hopper, and is his penultimate theater-themed work, followed by Two Comedians (1966), his very last painting. It was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2012.
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