Archive

  • Age of Transparency and Innocence: the Changing Face of Childhood

    The Changing Face of Childhood: British Children’s Portraits and their Influence in Europe Städel Museum, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany and Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Germany: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2007

  • Book review: Archaeology of an Urban Desert

    The birth of graffiti London/New York/Munich: Prestel, 2007 Jon Naar is a British photographer who has been based in New York. In 1974 he joined up with the late Norman Mailer to produce The Faith of Graffiti (1974), which contained…

  • Colin St John Wilson: Buildings and Projects

    London: Black Dog Publishing Ltd, 2007

  • The Art of Seduction

    Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now London: Merrell, 2007 This book is the catalogue of the current Barbican Exhibition in London. It forms a substantial volume, divided into ten chapters, covering different specs of the subject.

  • Architecture: London’s new rail terminus at St Pancras

    In the 18th century there lay just to the north of the burgeoning City of London, divided from the metropolis by green meadows, a pleasant leafy village capped by the church of St Pancras, and nearby the salubrious public house…

  • RB Kitaj

    (died 27 October 2007) The recent death of Ron Kitaj has not been the subject of the attention that an artist of such talent and repute would normally deserve. Notably, his adoption of London as his home city early on…

  • Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective

    Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. 2 November 2007-3 February 2008 This is the first major retrospective of Sidney Nolan’s paintings since his death in 1992. It presents an opportunity to unravel something of the artist’s enigma and evaluate…

  • Millais

    Tate Britain, London 26 September 2007-13 January 2008 The autumn grand exhibition at Tate Britain is on the work of John Everett Millais (1829-1896), promoted as the greatest painter of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Millais is most notable to Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts…

  • Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Projects

    The outstanding American landscapist Patricia Johanson occupies a unique position in American contemporary landscape design. She is first and foremost a conceptual artist who trained as an architect but who undoubtedly has brought a new meaning to the role.

  • Political Olympic football games

    It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. Just as the Conservative Party had earlier this year done a U-turn on museums and galleries admission charges, coming out against reimposing them, came bad portents. Tessa Jowell’s grim news…

  • Hostages to fortune

    The revelation that the collection of 20th century western art built up during the reign of the last shah of Iran is still languishing in museum cellars within Iran is no surprise to the art world, nor to dealers. Included…

  • Shear drama

    The dramatic crack created in the floor of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is, in places, waist deep. The exhibit was opened in early October. Perhaps it should also have run up (or down) the…

  • Bush windfall

    The National Museum of Australia in Canberra recently received one of the nation’s most important collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait art. Staff will make a stage by stage transfer of the collection, which is extensive. They have avoided allowing…

  • Learning from the beavers

    The UK boasts the only professor of animal architecture in the world, Mike Hansell, lately of Glasgow University. He has studied from early in his career the habitat constructions of beavers, birds, rats, wood lice, shrimps and even dinosaurs. The…

  • Australian master

    Artist George Lambert, who died relatively young aged 56, was a cosmopolitan who had a major effect on Australian art at the turn of the 19th century. He arrived in 1887 and was soon found to possess something of a…

  • Bilbao island dreams

    Bilbao island dreams Zaha Hadid, Britain’s brilliant female architect, has a superb project to dream of, on Bilbao’s Zorrozaurre peninsula. Under her current development plans she will convert the end promontory into an island. Although some 450 inhabitants still occupy…

  • The painting of modern life

  • Artists imagine action to stimulate change

    The Lisson Gallery, 5 July-22 September 2007 The Lisson Gallery in London took the phrase ‘Imagine Action’ as the title for its recent summer exhibition, crystallising the contributing artists’ focus on the social, the political, the utopian and the spaces…

  • Frieze Art Fair 2007

    Regent’s Park, London 11-14 October 2007 In only five years, Frieze has gone from a standing start to being a major fixture in the art world and beyond, to the extent that this year’s fair was praised by James Purnell…

  • Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint

    20 September-11 November 2007 Serpentine Gallery, London When we speak of executing something – an article, a work of art, a musical composition – we speak of working towards some kind of resolution, of there being a sequence of events…

  • Migrant architects from Britain: the RIBA Stirling Prize 2007

    As we digest the results of the annual celebration of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Award, it is also useful to cast an eye over the general state of the art. David Chipperfield was announced as the…

  • Logo, logo, all agogo

    Whatever happened to the £400,000 Olympic Games logo flashed around by the London 2012 Organising Committee in June? It went down like a lead balloon, as they say in Australia. Ken Livingstone had a total aversion to it, although Sebastian…

  • Its Lee Miller on the line (overseas call)

    It’s Lee Miller on the line (overseas call)

  • An enlightened state of denial

    The director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, champion of the Museum’s ongoing exchanges overseas, notably with China and with India recently, has gone out of his way to make a point about this historic institution dating from the Enlightenment…