Profession: artist

Boyle toured America with Hendrix, who encouraged him to keep his working methods secret, quoting Louis Armstrong as a precedent; they were in a bar together when live news of Martin Luther King’s assassination provoked redneck jubilation. Bacon was both friend and fan, while Cardew provided sound for some early performances (with Brecht another collaborator). Kaprow appeared in a piece by Boyle, and Boyle in a piece by Kaprow. His closest collaborators — on a lifetime basis and beyond — were his wife Joan Hills, and their children, their projects now properly identified as by the Boyle Family.

Darwin was Wright’s close friend, and treated his asthma; Wright painted his portrait more than once. Josiah Wedgwood and Arkwright were industrialist patrons as well as good friends, Arkwright’s mill featuring in a painting, all smouldering night-time chiaroscuro. Through the older Wedgwood, Wright befriended his son Thomas. Although Wright was never a Lunar Society member, Priestley, Watt and Boulton were also among his friends. Coleridge, travelling around the Midlands promoting his radical magazine, met Wright among other influential locals.

Mitchell held her own among the macho abstract-expressionist world. Wilder (published by her mother) read to her as a child. She rejected Hofmann’s teaching, but would meet him dog-walking (he’d tell her she should be painting). Orozco and Siquieros were met on a trip to Mexico. The de Koonings, Guston (who lived above her), Kline, Leslie and O’Hara were among a New York crowd, while in Paris she got to know Steinberg, Francis and her lover Riopelle. Beckett, a lifelong friend, admired her capacity for drink and passion for silence. Hartigan said she’d never heard anyone, male or female, swear like her.

Yeats, despite seeing himself as a late romanticist, is primarily significant for his role he played in modernist Irish culture. William Butler Yeats was his elder brother. The writers Synge and Masefield were both close friends; Masefield’s suggestion led to the month-long walking tour in the west of Ireland taken by Synge (as writer) and Yeats (as illustrator). Yeats met Twain on his only visit to the U.S., and Kokoschka when the Austrian was in Ireland. He was keenly supported by MacGreevy, corresponded with Sickert, counted Beckett as a close friend, and was visited regularly in his nursing home by O’Doherty.

No longer considered a major figure in art, Laurens nonetheless contributed significantly to the development of sculptural language in the earlier twentieth century. His key friendship, lifelong, was with Braque, who opened his eyes to a freer way of working, and introduced him to Picasso, Gris, and Léger. Chagall, Soutine and Modigliani were friends from la Ruche, Maillol a later neighbour. Like his friend Reverdy, whose poems he illustrated, Laurens was painfully shy. Giacometti wrote movingly about his sculpture, and like Matisse, was outraged at its lack of recognition at the Venice Biennale, Matisse indignantly sharing his prize money with Laurens.

The undoubted influence of Klimt’s elegant, often erotically-charged art, reflecting a certain fin-de-siècle decadence, has not lasted. A reserved man, he didn’t teach, travelled little, and had a small circle of intimates. Moser, Hoffmann and Olbrich were among fellow founding-members of the Vienna Secession (Klimt its first chairman). Klimt’s and Mahler’s lives often ran in parallel and occasionally crossed – he was among those gathered to wave the disillusioned composer off to America. Hoffmann, Schnitzler and Berg were friends (Berg and Schoenberg at his funeral), with Wagner a close friend and collaborator. He supported the younger Schiele, introducing him to patrons.