Archive

  • Piper\’s tune

    At Dulwich Picture Gallery, the late John Piper’s 1930s works are on show in ‘Abstraction on the Beach’, through to 22 June 2003. This show helps to reposition Piper’s important role in the development of British Modernism, and to demonstrate…

  • Mesopotamia

    Everything moves so fast in Iraq. It’s no longer a question of ‘shock and awe’, more one of the disappearing museum inventory. In the cradle of world civilisation, the great collection of antiquities has seen looting and pillaging on a…

  • London Review of Books — Shop, Bury Place, London, WC1

    LRB has actually opened its own shop, in an amazing display of commercial acumen. First Agatha went, from Duke Street, St James’s, then Zwemmer closed in late April. The niche that was the old LRB office is now a newer…

  • Enron collection flogged off

  • Clifford\’s travels

    Sir Timothy Clifford has no difficulty these days in turning up important works that other curators and directors do not know to be under their noses. News that Sir Tim, while flicking through the bundles in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,…

  • Chapmans again

    The ‘Rape of Goya’ might be called a curatorial wheeze. In the commodification of bad taste, this peculiar show must take the prix. However, certain elements of this apparent despoliation of Goya, by damaging posthumous etchings of the master in…

  • Art eclipsed

    The Reverend Julian Spalding, maverick commentator on the decline of British Art, has published his diatribe ‘The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today’. Crisis? Art? Spalding deserves the Chapman treatment of superimposed clowning. But where, indeed, is…

  • Amber enigma

    The St Petersburg Amber Room has been remade after almost 25 years of patient restoration. Originally a gift in 1716 from King Frederick-William I of Prussia to Peter the Great, Second World War German forces shipped off 27 panels to…

  • Max Beckmann

    Centre Pompidou, Paris. 11 September 2002-6 January 2003. Tate Modern, London. 13 February-5 May 2003. MoMA QNS, New York. 26 June-29 September 2003.

  • Tate Britain reaches out

    It is fair to say that the painter Graham Sutherland is not being served well by the national galleries in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. In April, Tate Britain will offer one room of works from its own…

  • Going shopping?

    If there was any evidence to prove that art is becoming a commodity, and even more so a consumer product, the excellent exhibition running at Tate Liverpool makes the issue crystal clear. ‘Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture’…

  • NYC Sex in the City

    The Museum of Sex recently opened in New York City. Unlike the wow TV series Sex in the City, which is strangely, obliquely conservative (well, with a small ‘c’), this museum intends to show how even sex in America transforms…

  • Raphael removal risk

    The Duke of Northumberland’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’ has been sold and removed from exhibition at the National Gallery to be sent to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles: just one of a continuing series of works lost to the…

  • Gormley in China

    The 120,000 clay figures produced under Antony Gormley’s direction by 300 Chinese workers in the Huada District of Guangzhou province, are shortly to travel to Beijing, where they will be marshalled into the Forbidden City, beside Tiananmen Square. This gathering,…

  • Elgin blow to the Acropolis

    ‘Treasure’ Neil MacGregor, also the safest and most inspired pair of hands in the world of National Museums and Galleries, has finally decided to put the foot down on the peripatetic speculation about the Elgin Marbles. This dashes any possible…

  • Closing in — comme ça, comme çi…

    Not Charles Saatchi but Frank Cohen – Who? Frank Cohen is, in fact, the major North of England collector who may yet rival Saatchi. Cohen owns works by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and the painter Gary Hume, mostly lodged in…

  • Agnelli collection goes to final home

    Before his death from cancer earlier this year at the age of 81, Gianni Agnelli had seen to fruition the donation of his collection for permanent display in Turin. The venue is a 13 million building by Renzo Piano. The…

  • How cities renew, rebuild & remember

    Perhaps it was just a little ironic that, at a time when the bombing of Baghdad was in the offing, a conference should be held in The Lighthouse, Glasgow, Scotland on Sense & the City. Addressed by speakers representing Glasgow,…

  • Botticelli worth £10 million found in vaults at National Gallery

    After lying unidentified for more than 150 years in the vaults of the National Gallery in London, a masterpiece by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli has been identified. If it were put up for auction, it is estimated it would…

  • Giorgio De Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne

    Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London 22 January-13 April 2003

  • Zeroing Ground Zero

    In early March, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will publicly announce the winner of the two finalists shortlisted to provide designs for the reconstruction of the 11 million square feet of office space destroyed on 11 September 2001.

  • New acquisition: Quattro Stagioni by Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London

    American artist Cy Twombly has four tall canvases on exhibition at the Tate Modern. ‘Quattro Stagioni’ (Four Seasons), a painting in four parts, was executed during the period 1993-94. The Edinburgh exhibition was the first solo exhibition in Scotland. The…

  • David Hockney: Painting on Paper

    Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 17 January-1 March 2003.

  • Titian: a must

    The Titian exhibition opening at the National Gallery, London (19 February through 18 May 2003) promises to be a unique experience unlikely to be repeated in decades. Tiziano Vecellio was born before the end of the 15th century, grew up…