Archive
-
Ratatat ra
Cartavaggio The Royal Collection has been doing a bit of early spring cleaning in the vaults, in time for the Queen’s Gallery’s planned exhibition, ‘The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque’. Wow, look what fell out…
-
Papering the walls
Shock, horror! Fake Damien Hirst prints alert at Sotheby’s. The so-called spot prints are much easier to copy than Leonardo’s work. It is thought that this scam may ‘kill Hirst’s market’, since both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been conned by…
-
Bargain basement futures
Florence is still struggling to overcome the colossal damage created by the Arno flood of 4 November 1966. One of the greatest projects is the restoration of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Ultima Cena’ (‘Last Supper’), a five-panelled masterpiece. The painting had been…
-
Treasures of the Ming Dynasty are Unearthed in Jingdezhen
In its recent exhibit of Ming Dynasty porcelains, the Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University displayed more than 100 works discovered in imperial kilns in Jingdezhen, China. Not only was this a chance to see…
-
Boom or clunk?
The latest press speculation that the National Lottery will be expected to transfer massive funding to bail out the 2012 Olympic Games has ramifications that extend far and wide in the sponsorship field, not least to the Heritage Lottery Fund
-
Robert Rauschenberg: Combines
Centre Pompidou, Paris 11 October 2006-15 January 2007
-
Architecture in Scotland 2004-2006: Defining Place
The Lighthouse, Glasgow 1 April-5 June 2006
-
Holbein in England
Tate Britain, London 28 September 2006-7 January 2007 Hans Holbein the Younger was an artist and painter by profession, and a humanist intellectual by inclination and persuasion. He grew up in Augsburg in southern Germany where the Italian Renaissance was…
-
In the Playground of a Master Alchemist
András Böröcz Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York 18 October-25 November 2006
-
MoMA Sets An Eye On Europe
Eye On Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now Museum of Modern Art, New York 15 October 2006-1 January 2007
-
Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction
Tate Modern, London 22 June-1 October 2006 Kunstmuseum, Basel 21 October 2006-4 February 2007 For decades, art history taught us that Kandinsky was the greatest pioneer of abstract art, the artist who removed the subject matter from painting. The great…
-
Velázquez
National Gallery, London 18 October 2006-21 January 2007 The current Velázquez exhibition is certainly a show to which two visits can scarcely do justice. The important preliminary to this exhibition has to be his group painting ‘Las Meninas’ (unfortunately unable…
-
Breaking the Myths
Modigliani and His Models Royal Academy of Arts, London 8 July-15 October 2006 Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884-1920) premature death at the age of 35, as a consequence of bohemian excess, overshadowed a proper analysis of his work for many years. His…
-
William Hogarth
Musée du Louvre, Paris 20 October 2006-8 January 2007 The great 18th-century caricaturist, William Hogarth, who signed himself ‘Britophil’, caught the mood with flattering – if double-edged – national stereotypes. People loved his beer-swilling, roast-beef-guzzling, four-square Englishmen, the ‘dread and…
-
Maggie’s Zaha
On 3 November, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown opened the Maggie’s Centre for Cancer Care in his own constituency at Kirkcaldy in Fife, Scotland. This building has been designed (expenses only – no fees) by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born…
-
Towers have ground settlement
Richard Rogers and Norman Foster have managed to conceive two towers, one designed by each, close to each other on the contentious Ground Zero site. The towers are also considered by all to be complementary to each other. This must…
-
Superhumanatural
Glasgow artist, Douglas Gordon, recently returned from New York, has a mega-exhibition of this title in Edinburgh, centred both on the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Botanic Gardens in the city. He recently exhibited darkly but with success in…
-
The UK/RIBA 2006 Stirling Prize
The prize has been award to Richard Rogers’ architectural practice, RRP, for the stunning, 1.25 km-long Madrid Barajas Airport. This is a masterly demonstration by Rogers of state-of-the-art airport design, breaking new space barriers in the 21st century. The partnership…
-
Rip off
-
Paris Art Fair
-
Finders keepers?
In Robert Hughes’ new memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (Harvill Secker, 2006) lies the harrowing tail-end of a talented life plagued by adversity. An early career surge, followed by taking up the role of Time magazine art correspondent from 1970…
-
Kerry James Marshall: Along the Way
Finishing its last call on 22 October 2006 was the exhibition entitled Along the Way, covering the work of the American artist Kerry James Marshall from Chicago. This excellent show had already been at the Camden Arts Centre in London,…
-
Cocooning Paris
The £70 million glass museum to house the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Group’s newly planned art gallery has been commissioned by Bernard Arnaud, president of the group. Arnaud has been claimed to be the richest man in France, with an…
