Archive

  • Utopia: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye

    National Museum of Australia, Canberra 22 August-12 October 2008

  • Book review: The Diary of Charles Holme’s 1889 Visit to Japan and North America

    Toni Huberman, Sonia Ashmore and Yasuko Suga (eds) Kent: Global Oriental Ltd, 2008

  • Book review: The revision of the modern: seeking the real narrative

    Sadly, this important study was published just before the author’s untimely death earlier this year. Paul Overy was a well-recognised author dealing with 20th-century art and architecture

  • Medium or rare: the art-market grill

    It has been a curious coincidence that the extraordinary Damien Hirst sale took place just before global finances collapsed. It might have happened on a different planet. Yet it has been possible, now both dustbowls have settled momentarily, to weigh…

  • Nine Green Bottles: ‘Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964’

    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 16 September-14 December 2008

  • Book review: Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone

    A new biographical study of the architect Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) is most timely. The historical importance of this remarkable polymath has been in need of revision for four decades or more

  • To Die For, images of Castle Howard on a certain day

    Photographic images by Nick Howard Castle Howard, Yorkshire 1 September-30 December 2008 ‘To Die For’ at Castle Howard in Yorkshire presents 13 large photographs by Nick Howard taken in 99 minutes between 7:26 and 9:05 on 19 October 2007. The…

  • Richard Demarco, Edinburgh International Festival, 2008

    It may be a product of age or lack of funding and proper premises but, whatever the reason, Richard Demarco’s activities during the most vibrant period of the Edinburgh Festival appear to be somewhat diminished. Perhaps when one comes to…

  • Museums in the 21st century

    The Louisiana Museum in Denmark offers a quiet, liminal space for contemplation, isolated from everyday reality.1 It is a place where a modern, circular white gallery turns to a wooded landscape of sculptures, overlooking The Sound towards Sweden in a…

  • Phyllis Lambert and the Canadian Centre for Architecture

    Phyllis Lambert is now in her 81st year and her long life is particularly associated with two buildings: the Seagram Building in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. In the creation of both, she played…

  • Oscar Munoz: the Presence of the Absence

    Mirror Image Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), London 13 June-27 July 2008

  • Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945

    National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 10 June-3 September 2007 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 12 October 2007-9 January 2008 Milwaukee Art Museum 9 Feb 2008-4 May 2008 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh June 7-August 31 2008…

  • Richard Hamilton: ‘Protest pictures’

    Inverleith House, Edinburgh 31 July-12 October 2008

  • Charles Saatchi creates a new space

    The exhibition ‘New Britannia’ will open in about a year’s time, in Saatchi’s new premises in Chelsea. This is a welcome move from London’s County Hall. There will be 70,000 sq.ft., creating the largest contemporary art gallery available in the…

  • Quadrupeds help out

    The news that Lord Rothschild, a man of impeccable taste, has acquired, through his Rothschild Family Trust, the life-sized horse sculpture named ‘Perceval’ by the sculptor Sarah Lucas takes further the English obsession with large-scale equestrian sculptures, indeed nothing less…

  • Logo with legs

    Now that we are in Britain in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, the presence of the ‘broken’ logo will abound and develop innumerable variants. Colliding and colluding wherever possible with the Union Flag, the £400,000 item designed originally by…

  • Hirst\’s coup d\’etat against the dealers

    The Damien Hirst art industry is limbering up for the massive sale of his work in September, of some £65 million worth of work, to the chagrin of the dealers. They just have to go with it; there is no…

  • Garden with a view

    English gardener Nick Dakin-Elliot is part of an international team dedicated to restoring the particular ambience of Villa La Pietra, Fiesole, overlooking Florence. The villa and gardens previously the home of the late historian and author Harold Acton had during…

  • Campbell rising inexorably

    When 54-year-old painter Steven Campbell died in July 2007 with a ruptured appendix, he was planning to re-commence work. But it was not to be. Now 11 key oil paintings are exhibited in Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow Print…

  • Don\’t throw bricks, someone could get hurt

    There is no shortage of plans, but sad to relate (at present) the new extension by architects Herzog and de Meuron, costing £215 million, is ailing in terms of the build-up of funds: the building will provide a further 60%…

  • About a wall: Hadrian at the British Museum

    History, at least in Northern Europe, essentially defines the Emperor Hadrian, subject of the British Museum’s brilliant new exhibition, as the man who ordered the Wall. Hadrian was always concerned with controlling entry to the Empire’s successors in the Western…

  • A Runaway Girl at Home in New York: Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

    Louise Bourgeois, a travelling retrospective marking the artist’s nearly 100 years of living and more than seven decades of art-making, is an ambitious project. Opening in October 2007 at Tate Modern in London, the exhibit appeared at the Centre Georges…

  • William Kelly – Artist as Peacemaker

    American-born Australian artist and human rights advocate, William Kelly first visited Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1968, and settled there in 1974. An important artist and teacher, he early established an intellectual and creative originality as an artist. With…

  • Art, Consciousness and Other Intractable Problems

    ‘Neuroscience is emerging as one of the grand belief systems informing the imagination of artists and writers in the twenty-first century’,1 writes the neuropsychologist and author Paul Broks in the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. It is certainly a rapidly…