
Penny Slinger: the feminist surrealist who was too erotic for the art world
7 September 2022 - 41 mins explicitPenny Slinger was a mover and shaker in Swinging London's art scene – though you might not have heard of her. She went to Chelsea Art School at the height of the Pop Art boom and, inspired by Max Ernst, went on to mix up self-portrait, collage, film and sculpture to create surreal and feminist images that still provoke today. Among these were her “full frontal collages”, including ones where Penny appears inside a wedding cake, the slice between her legs removed. Her 1977 collage masterpiece, An Exorcism, meanwhile, evoked the darkness of the English psyche, stitching together ghoulish images of the countryside, genitals, nuns and manor houses. In the UK, Penny counted the photographer Lee M...

Sue Tilley: the 1980s club kid and artist on Leigh Bowery and modelling for Lucian Freud
explicitTilley is one of London's best-known club kids, the best friend and biographer of iconic performance artist Leigh Bowery and a muse of the painter Lucian Freud
27 mins
28 February Finished

S4 Ep10: The Last Bohemians Live at Tate Lates: Hilma af Klint with Lily Cole and Amrita Dhallu
In this very special live episode of The Last Bohemians, as part of Tate Lates, host Kate Hutchinson talks to actor, model and activist Lily Cole and Amrita Dhallu, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, to discuss the life and work of Swedish pioneer of abstract art, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Cole stars as one of De Fem ('The Five'), af Klint's Stockholm-based spiritual group who communed with spirits during séances in the late-1800s, in Lasse Hallström's brand new biopic of the artist. Dhallu is part of the team who put together Tate Modern's latest exhibition, boldly pairing Klint's extraordinary paintings with those of Piet Mondrian and asking us to consider the role that the natural world played in their work. Together, they consider how great women artists throughout history have been criminally overlooked, the legacy of af Klint's work today and why the af Klint renaissance is in full-swing.
46 mins
25 May 2023 Finished

S4 Ep9: Julia Cameron: the bestselling author on addiction, creative energy and The Artist's Way
An audio addendum to our LA season this year, The Last Bohemians hopped over to Santa Fé to meet the one and only Julia Cameron. Our series is dedicated to creative women who've lived their lives outside the norm. Julia has spent hers guiding others, with her creativity manual The Artist's Way. Very sadly, Julia had just lost her beloved dog when we arrived one afternoon, but she soldiered on. It's a whistlestop tour through her early days, breaking into the boys club of 1970s journalism, through her wild thirties in Hollywood married to Martin Scorsese, and eventually how she turned her life around by relocating to Georgia O'Keefe country, with its endlessly inspiring landscapes, and discussing addiction and recovery, harnessing the creativity spirit, sexism and psychic powers, how she helped to write Taxi Driver, her friendship with Eve Babitz and much more. Presenter and Exec Producer: Kate Hutchinson Editor: Georgie Rogers Photography and recording: Anna Kooris
29 mins
16 November 2022 Finished

Michéle Lamy: the subversive style shaman on couture, chaos and Kim Kardashian
explicitFrench fashion disruptor Michéle Lamy is known as the wife of designer Rick Owens but she's is a chameleonic creative in her own right, forever staging art happenings and musical collaborations around the world, as well as co-designing the furniture for the Rick Owens line. She’s so in-demand that she’s tricky to track down: we did this interview partly in London, at Claridges, and partly at the Chateau Marmont in LA, where Michéle lived until the early 2000s. In those days, she was better known as the owner of cult Hollywood nightspot Les Deux Cafe, where she performed smoky jazz numbers in her thick drawl. Now Michéle is more nomadic, attracting beautiful freaks wherever she goes. A gothic style icon, her signature look is ink-dipped fingers, a line of kohl on her forehead and a cigarette always in her hand. Listen out for her many bangles too, which clank as she speaks about her style awakening in the Moroccan desert, why she loves collaboration and much more.
26 mins
21 September 2022 Finished

Johanna Went: the cult performance art-punk on feminism, fake blood, embracing ageing and inspiring Lady Gaga
explicitThe Last Bohemians LA, supported by Audio-Technica, meets the “hyena of performance art”, whose transgressive spectacles of New Wave theatre, experimental noise, elaborate and crude costumes, chaotic rituals, gory props like pig heads and blood – lots of blood – built a cult following in the 1980s LA punk scene and predated Lady Gaga’s meat dress by decades
34 mins
18 August 2022 Finished