The Sunday Telegraph London, August 7th, 2005
THE SYMBIOTIC relationship between critic and artist, when nicely balanced, can be mutually beneficial. Iain Pears, an art historian as well as a novelist of complex ingenuity and cool stylishness, has written in The Portrait about what can happen when the balance is deranged. The conflicting interests of a despotic critic and a resolutely independent painter, once friends, result in suicide and murder.
On the cover of the book there is a clue to the nature of the sophisticated melodrama within. "Vengeance,'' proclaims a superscription, "is an art.'' In the London art milieu at the turn of th...
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