Archive

  • Lessons on contemporary art

    It seems, notwithstanding the dramatic and soul-searching (and mind-blocking) rehang at Tate Modern, that the gentler approach of the Van Abbe Museum provides a no less powerful vindication of modern art. This is timely, since, this year, the Eindhoven museum…

  • E lei Terragni: Chipperfield pulls it off again

    The English architect, David Chipperfield, has completed a new museum of German literature in Marburg. This is a part of the Schiller Archive there. The building is reduced to a poetic transformation of glass and concrete; yet, curiously but appropriately,…

  • Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939

    Victoria and Albert Museum, London 6 April-23 July 2006 The catalogue promotion for this remarkable exhibition of early 20th-century design pioneers suggests that the contemporary built environment was ‘largely shaped by Modernism’. This is simply not true. The reality was…

  • Dada Revisited for the 21st Century

    Dada Pompidou Centre, Paris 5 October 2005-9 January 2006 It is not often that an art exhibition ascends to the condition of a total artwork in itself, and at the same time acts as a timely reminder of the true…

  • Celtic Vision

    John Bellany: A Scottish Odyssey Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche, Aschaffenburg 16 June-3 September 2006 John Bellany’s (b.1942) paintings are among the most confrontational humanistic paintings produced in Britain in recent history. Layered with references to the Expressionistic tradition in art (Bosch, Breughel,…

  • Ettore Sottsass: Architect & Designer – book review

    Ronald T Labaco. London & New York: Merrell, 2006. ISBN 18589943205, 9781858943206

  • Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion – book review

    Klaus Albrecht Schroder. Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2006. ISBN 379132229X

  • The Terribly Human Tomi Ungerer

    The Human Comedy: Drawings and Posters by Tomi Ungerer Boston Public Library 7 February-31 March 2006

  • Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art – book review

    Paul Coldwell. London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art/Philip Wilson Publishers, 2006 ISBN 0856676209

  • Albers & Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World

    Tate Modern, London 9 March–4 June 2006 Two of the great practitioner-teachers of 20th-century art, Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, were born in the late years of the 19th century. Both taught at the Bauhaus and were caught up in…

  • Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era

    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 9 December 2005-26 March 2006 National Museum of Australia, Canberra 21 April-4 June 2006 The exhibition ‘Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era’ has succeeded in seizing the imagination of thousands…

  • Moholy-Nagy and that transient London spring

    Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a brilliant luminary who was a formidable influence in Europe and England, in the period up to 1935. After that brief sojourn in London, he left for the United States, where he died prematurely in November 1945.…

  • Michaelangelo\’s Etruscan roots

    The remarkable exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings currently causing major traffic congestion around the British Museum (through 25 June) raises the question of capacity control. The viewer has to be determined in this sardine syndrome. The drawings for the most part…

  • Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination

    Tate Britain, London 15 February-1 May 2006 What fascinates us in an artwork? One answer to this question is content that conveys a sense of harmony and rightness: summer landscapes bathed in sunshine; human beauty, strength and agility; stories that…

  • Fashion in Colors

    Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York 9 December 2005-26 March 2006 Costume is usually viewed through a frame of fashion: a piece of clothing is set against its context in chronology, trend and social ambience under normal circumstances of speculation.…

  • The Istanbul Modern Art Museum

    The Istanbul Modern can be hard to find. It is still new enough that taxi drivers are not quite sure where it is and guidebooks have not been published recently enough to include it. However, it could not be in…

  • Joseph Beuys Collection, Museum Schloss Moyland

    Driving through the landscape of the north Rhine on the Dutch-German border is an almost mystical experience. Here, extensive glacial moraines have been washed down over millennia from the Alps, hundreds of miles distant, to create a topography of flat,…

  • William Nicholson: Paintings

    Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York 16 February-25 March 2006

  • Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul

    Museum of Modern Art, New York 19 February-8 May 2006 ‘I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the…

  • Martin Kippenberger

    Tate Modern, London 8 February-14 May 2006 Kippenberger’s restless stylistic movements resist the monumentality that a retrospective can impart, and this resistance gives the exhibition a manic energy. Rooms full of painted pastiche spill out into sculptures, books, catalogues and…

  • Americans in Paris, 1860-1900

    The National Gallery, London 22 February-21 May 2006 Paris, at the end of the 19th century, encompassed European tradition and the avant-garde. Having superseded Rome and London as the art capital of the world, it drew artists from all over…

  • Tom Hunter, Living in Hell and Other Stories

    The National Gallery, London 7 December 2005-12 March 2006. Since 1997, Tom Hunter has turned his camera on his surrounding neighbourhood of Hackney, showing empathy without being polemic. He is known for a remarkable blend of political commentary, history of…

  • The Trees for the Wood – the Enigmatic Genius of Jacob van Ruisdael

    Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape The Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London 25 February-4 June 2006 There is major significance in Seymour Slive’s excellent exhibition currently showing in the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, London. Jacob van…

  • The Sound of Colors: A Journey of the Imagination – book reiew

    Jimmy Liao, Sarah L Thompson. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006 ISBN: 0316939927