Archive

  • Book review: Pallasmaa phenomenon

    Archipelago: Essays on Architecture for Juhani Pallasmaa Peter MacKeith (ed) Helsinki: Rakennustieto/Building Information Ltd, 2006

  • Richard England: Architect as Artist

    Dennis Sharp (ed) London: BookART, 2007 Dennis Sharp has produced this well-prepared monograph to coincide (approximately) with England’s 70th birthday. Launched earlier in February 2008 at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, it comes at a time when…

  • Down Among the Bowery Boys

    The New Museum of Contemporary Art (Lower East Side, Manhattan)

  • Revisiting Juan Soriano in Philadelphia

    An interview with Edward J. Sullivan Mexican artist Juan Soriano is an intriguing figure among the personalities animating the history of Mexican art and literature following the Revolution. Although the charismatic artist influenced and affected his better-known contemporaries (eg Diego…

  • Book review: The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History

    Bernard Smith Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2007 According to the Australian art historian Bernard Smith, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History, is ‘probably his last book’. At 91, he is probably right. What is certain is…

  • That wrecking tendency

    The British Council has offended over 100 of Britain’s leading artists, including such luminaries as Rachel Whiteread, Peter Blake, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sir Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert and George and the Chapman Brothers, backed up by a phalanx of leading gallery directors;…

  • Dance for joy

    It is nothing short of miraculous that the Royal Academy’s blockbuster show ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg’ is now open at last, up and running, swirling and dancing like the figures in…

  • Bottom line in culture

    The latest fad exciting national UK enthusiasts up and along Downing Street is a proposal for a £100 million National Museum of British History. Guess who is running this idea? Our personable former Minister of Education Kenneth Baker, now Lord…

  • An Exhibition of Event Photography

    ‘Written by the Photographs: Art History’ Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany 8 December 2007-2 March 2008 For anyone interested in the ways in which a photograph can aspire to the condition of a work of art, there is an exhibition…

  • From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price

    Stanley Mathews London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. There can be few architects who have built so little but have had such an influence on architecture thinking in the second half of the 20th century as Cedric Price, forever associated with…

  • NeoCraft Conference

    The NeoCraft Conference held in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of November had a very ambitious programme, ranging from looking at the traditions and innovations in aboriginal crafts in…

  • The Art of Nothing: Ivo Mesquita and the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo

    The ‘Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo’ is now one of the major international displays of contemporary art, along with two other grand showcases of modern and contemporary art; the estimable ‘Venice Biennale’, first held in 1895; and ‘Documenta’…

  • Book review: Marvellous Melbourne

    Design City Melbourne. Leon van Schaik. John Wiley & Sons, 2006. This important city monograph was first published over a year ago, but it is exemplary within the ‘World City’ genre beyond those established by Academy Group in the 1990s…

  • Book review: Heterotopic visions

    Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modelling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory by David Grahame Shane London: Wiley, 2006 Increasingly, contemporary artists, as much as architects and urban planners, have to grope for a clearer understanding of the nature of cities…

  • Seduced by the Oldest Topic in the World

    Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now Barbican Arts Centre 12 October 2007–27 January 2008 Sex is an extremely popular subject, but ‘sex appeal’ is nearly impossible to define. People seem to seek this elusive quality in everything they…

  • Sleepless in Siena

    Renaissance Siena: Art for a City National Gallery, London 24 October 2007 – 13 January 2008 The current winter show at the National Gallery, London, perhaps springs from mixed motives. Firstly, and laudably, it comes as the swansong of the…

  • Joan Eardley

    Joan Eardley’s life was cut tragically short by cancer in 1963 at the age of 42. Born in England she spent her life in Scotland, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Two subjects dominate the retrospective exhibition at…

  • The One and the Many: Carlos Ortiz and the Dance of Life

    Ortiz’s conception of Latino identity is a true melting pot, an energetic, all-encompassing swirl made up of a multitude of rhythms. The artist’s vision is, essentially, musical and spiritual, grounded by the physical acts of drumming, singing, writing, painting and,…

  • Breaking the Rules – The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937

    Based on the British Library’s huge collection of manuscripts, sound recordings and all manner of things printed, Breaking the Rules tries to cram 40 years of pan-European avant-garde publishing into the Pearson Gallery. The result invites both delight and frustration…

  • The 52nd Venice Biennale

    The 52nd Venice Biennale ended on 21 November 2007. It will have presented an enormous challenge to all those responsible for its dismantling, because it was certainly memorable for its overwhelming scale and complexity. It spread its physical presence far…

  • Towers: from Manhattan to Moscow

    Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building, situated on 8th Avenue, Manhattan, was opened this month to considerable approval from New Yorkers, architects, critics and particularly the press, who will work within Piano’s superb spaces. The tower is 52 storeys high.…

  • Extreme Embroidery: Art and Craft Meet On the Verge

    In 2007, the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City embarked on a series of exhibits examining ways in which contemporary artists are reinventing the age-old techniques and styles of traditional handcrafts. The first show in the series,…

  • The Apparitions of a Surrealist Eye: Dalí & Film

    Salvador Dalí’s involvement with film was profound and critical to his artistic sensibilities

  • Bauhaus: 1919-1933

    The complete building is the final aim of the visual arts. Their noblest function was once the decoration of buildings. They were inseparable parts of the great art of building. Today, they exist in isolation, from which they can be…