MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Getting those excitations
JAN WOOLF marvels at the dream-like forms of little-known English surrealist Henry Orlik, whose work reaches back to the traumas of war and migration
(L) Defeat (Aeroplane over LA); (R) Beauty and Sharks
[Henry Orlik and Winsor Birch] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Henry Orlik, Cosmos of Dreams
Maas Gallery, London
LIKE me, you have probably not heard of the painter Henry Orlik. That’s because painting, not fame was his game. Eschewing the conceits of the art world, dealers took most of the money, leaving little for the artist.
A recluse for 50 years and now aged 77, Orlik has agreed to his first major retrospective, Cosmos of Dreams, at the Maas Gallery London, and later in his hometown of Marlborough.
The work is engrossing.
Similar stories
JAN WOOLF wallows in the historical mulch of post WW2 West Germany, and the resistant, challenging sense made of it by Anselm Kiefer
The playwright and artist reflects on the ways in which reviewing can nourish the creative act
JAN WOOLF revels in a painter of the poetic, whose freshness emulates that of the very young
CHRISTINE LINDEY identifies the socialist impulse and sympathy with working people that underlies the artistic mission and inspired work of Vincent Van Gogh