Latest news with #TheVioletHour
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Wicker Park staple The Violet Hour closed until further notice
CHICAGO — Wicker Park's critically acclaimed bar, The Violet Hour, will remain closed until further notice, the establishment announced over the weekend. The bar, located at 1520 N. Damen Avenue, has already been closed for nearly three weeks due to ongoing plumbing issues and internal repairs needed at the property. Wicker Park bar named one of the nation's best by Food & Wine In a statement shared on social media, the owners say they are still in discussions with the building's landlord about how to proceed with the repairs. As a result, the reopening date remains uncertain. 'While we don't have a set timeline yet, it is very much our intention to reach a resolution and make the necessary repairs to the building,' the post read. The closure comes just ahead of the James Beard Awards, set to take place in Chicago on June 16. The Violet Hour had been scheduled to host a pop-up for Scotch Lodge, a nominated bar from Portland, Oregon. A new cocktail book from The Violet Hour's Beverage Director Bar officials say that event has now been moved to Friends of Friends, a newly opened neighborhood bar at 2001 W. Grand Avenue. All existing reservations will be honored at the new venue. 'Thank you for your continued support. We can't wait to welcome you back, if and when the time is right,' The Violet Hour said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Herald Scotland
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: The Violet Hour, at the DIG festival, is a real 'wow' show
Dance The Violet Hour DIG at Tramway, Glasgow Mary Brennan four stars Twilight…when tricks of the altering light can make you question what you see. Or what you think you see. This slippage between what's real, and what randomly exists in your mind's eye, is one of the fascinating undercurrents in Colette Sadler's latest dance-work, The Violet Hour, seen - for one night only - at this year's DIG. Three dancers - Leah Marojevic, Samir Kennedy and Maëva Barthelot - bring Sadler's mesh of intriguing concepts before us with an unflagging devotion to detail that is simply astounding. At first, all three are 'marooned' on a narrow downstage dias - bodies close but, as yet, not touching. Marojevic is the first to step down and slowly test out the unknown terrain - a projection of an arid landscape at sunrise is the backdrop to her gradual discovery of how her own body behaves, stretching and balancing as the day fades into night.
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Violet Hour by James Cahill review – art, secrets and lies
James Cahill's first novel, Tiepolo Blue, charted the sexual liberation and psychic disintegration of an uptight Cambridge art historian. It was a bravura performance that more than lived up to its extravagant pre-publication praise. But can his second, The Violet Hour, live up to his first? Cahill himself is more than aware of the reputational tightrope walk that is a creative career. The Violet Hour features a fictional contemporary artist, Thomas Haller, whose own eminence, from the 1990s onwards, is contrasted with the downbeat experience of perhaps equally talented female artists who are hitting their heads against glass ceilings and brick walls. Despite his success as an abstract painter who has defined himself against the YBA aesthetic, Haller has been on the receiving end of one devastatingly negative review, brilliantly and wittily ventriloquised by Cahill. The motives for it turn out to be complicatedly personal. After the dusty parochialism of Cambridge, the canvas here is broader, more global, more glamorous, cutting between New York, London, Hong Kong, Montreux. But the same theme – art and lies – endures. While Tiepolo Blue featured a Mephistophelean mentor, here we have a svengali in the shape of a European international art dealer, Claude, whose sinister will to power emerges as we turn the pages at increasingly anxious speed. The novel begins with a set-piece scene in London's Vauxhall in which a young man falls, like Bruegel's Icarus, from a balcony to his death. Who he is, and what his connection is to Haller, unfolds through complex plotting with calculated dead ends to trip the reader up. Antonioni's Blow-Up, the classic 1966 film that famously fails to give closure, is name-checked. Another crucial cinematic reference is Douglas Sirk's Technicolor 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, stills from which are ultimately revealed as Haller's inspiration. His seemingly abstract intellectual canvases turn out to be 'kitsch': slavish copies, massively blown up, of minute visual details from the movie. But does that make his art less 'real'? As with Tiepolo Blue, erudite allusions abound, yet there's a thriller element that keeps you reading. This is a novel about art and its moral compromises, and The Violet Hour's tutelary spirit is that of Henry James, creator of the villainous aesthete Gilbert Osmond and a writer whose work is peculiarly conflicted on the topic of art. James's comments on his own 'fidget of composition' and finding 'the next happy twist of my subject' are quoted here by one of the characters, making Cahill as self-consciously implicated a literary artist as the Master himself. Like James, Cahill is brave when it comes to empathising with female characters as a gay man. His portrayal of the unravelling of the lesbian relationship between Haller's New York gallerist Lorna and her younger lover Justine, through jealousy and professional rivalry, rings true. Prior to meeting Justine, Lorna had been close to the now fabled Thomas Haller at art school in London in the 1990s before later becoming his New York dealer. They had even had a brief, odd sexual encounter, resulting in a pregnancy. Lorna is haunted by the baby boy she gave up for adoption. The plot plays on her desire both to know and not know what has happened to him. Meanwhile she and rival dealer Claude fight it out over the soul of Haller. This is an enthrallingly intricate novel, with a large cast of characters whose stories and psychological hinterlands are successfully interlinked through the mesh of art, money and desire. Lorna and Claude are the dealers, while the buyer on the other side of the equation is Leo Goffman: a billionaire New York real estate mogul and owner of the best collection of modernist art in private hands. He's a monster. But his cupidity for Picassos, Brâncușis – and Hallers – turns out to be a reaction to trauma, denial and the loss of a child that parallels Lorna's experience. This novel, which plays so much on ideas of memory and illusion, can perhaps only be fully grasped on rereading. Haller's career was made by a 'retrospective' in New York, and his behaviour in the earlier parts of the story only makes full sense in retrospect. This is a text that demands – and repays – the reader's attention. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Cahill's talent for combining clean, hard prose with pit-of-the-stomach emotional chaos was evidenced in his first novel. Here, even the most throwaway descriptive writing – a New York skyline, say, resembling a tray of proffered bottles – is edgily on point. The dialogue at times reads like an accomplished screenplay, to the extent that it seems to be pitching to be simplified for adaptation. Good luck to Cahill if so. But the more subtle Jamesian nuances of this impressive novel, which outstrips its idiosyncratic predecessor in ambition, will be lost in the process. The Violet Hour by James Cahill is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed
Novels set in the 'art world', as it's often called, rarely take their milieu, or any of the people in it, seriously. More often, the international circuit of artists, dealers and collectors – and, of course, the gatekeeping curators and critics – appears as an object of ridicule: a self-important playground for the absurdly privileged. From first-hand experience, I can confirm that this isn't entirely unfair. In his second novel, The Violet Hour, James Cahill blends predictable satire with a more unusual, earnest approach. He knows what he's talking about, having worked as an art critic and with galleries for the past 15 years; he also has a PhD in classics, which explored the influence of antiquity on today's artists. His 2022 debut, Tiepolo Blue, charted the unravelling of a buttoned-up art historian in 1990s Britain, just as the YBAs were on the rise: an uneven but promisingly uncommon novel. The Violet Hour takes place in the present, with an expanded cast of jet-setting characters, all fictional – although interspersed with references to real artists and institutions, and in some cases with what anyone who knows the industry might consider clear non-fictional counterparts. Narrated in the close third-person, the story switches between the perspectives of a successful abstract painter called Thomas Haller; his long-time dealer, Lorna Bedford; and Leo Goffman, an elderly real-estate developer and 'collector' (as rich buyers are known). Early on, Leo calls up Lorna, hellbent on acquiring a painting which he saw in an ad for Thomas's latest show – a 'soft purple', like 'the sky at nightfall', with a 'dark fissure' near the middle – but Lorna informs him that the artist has recently defected to a competitor: Claude Berlins, an international mega-gallerist who has built a new outpost in London. Lorna, meanwhile, is preoccupied by the mystery of the death of one of Berlins' employees, who fell from a building in Vauxhall just before the opening of Thomas's show. Gradually, the murky and interconnected pasts of these people are brought to light – and it becomes clear that, in The Violet Hour, the art world is less a professional network than an arena in which psychosexual dramas might play out. The tussle between dealers over Thomas is rooted not in the reliably high prices that his work commands – although it's true that 'panels of pure colour filled with plays of light' are the easiest kind of art to sell – but in intimate personal relationships that stretch back decades. Thomas harbours many of his own secrets, including what he knows about what happened that night in Vauxhall. Leo's acquisitive quest is really an attempt to distract from deep grief. Even a negative exhibition review, written by Lorna's on-and-off girlfriend Justine, is chalked up to 'jealousy and anguish… sublimated into art criticism'. While Cahill's twists and reveals are fun, there's just too much going on, and a number of the characters come across more as ideas for characters than real people. (Justine, author of 'a self-help manual crossed with a takedown of neoliberalism', is particularly flat.) It doesn't help that Cahill's prose can be rather expository and uninspired. At the same time, though, there are flashes of emotion, moments of flair; take, for instance, the description of when Lorna reunites with Thomas after a six-year absence: 'The surprise of seeing his face (its very familiarity a surprise)'. And, as you might expect, but in contrast to what is usually found in fiction about the art world, the descriptions of artworks, both real and imagined, are lucid and evocative. Perhaps the best element is the relatively secondary character of Leo Goffman. From the start, he's established as unremittingly horrible. He treats his housekeeper like a slave; he knocks a woman over with his car, and shows no contrition when she dies. Worst of all, he subscribes to art magazines for the adverts: he likes Artforum because there's 'not too much bulls--- editorial'. And yet: some of the passages devoted to him are by far the most original and beguiling here. As his health deteriorates, Leo becomes haunted by a hallucination of a 'beast' with bristling fur and rancid breath. It's unclear what the beast symbolises: it could be desire, or death, or both. Cahill's novel is better for allowing this strangeness in.
