Barbara Trapido’s marvellous novel Brother of the More Famous Jack has just been reissued to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first publication. The title alone deserves a party. It puts its finger on a big category – the person who gets used to being an adjunct. It’s a category traditionally inhabited by women and was nailed in an excellent poem, also from the 1980s, by Selima Hill: “I am the wife of the man who won first prize.”
The prize Hill mentions was for a painting and I often remember her poem when looking at 20th-century artists and their male sibs or hubbies: Tirzah Garwood and Eric Ravilious, Gwen and Augustus John, Winifred and Ben Nicholson. It came to mind again recently when I visited the village of Les Arques in the Lot region of France, where a museum is dedicated to the sculpture of Ossip Zadkine. It is an intense experience. In the parish church, Zadkine’s huge crucifixion twists opposite a pietà; one room is filled with his wooden mythological works, another with bristling bronzes – a group under bombardment, arms outstretched, struck home hard.
