Archive

  • Freud for all

    The massive hype generated for, rather than by, Tate Britain’s Lucian Freud exhibition had critics vying with one another to write the best eulogy. Still with another month to run, the greatest display of flesh ever since Smithfield revealed unwittingly…

  • Ethical Tate Modern

    Earlier this summer, on 20 June, Nicholas Serota introduced Artworks: Young Artists of the Year Awards, where 30 schools will be beneficiaries. The awards are designed to persuade children to engage with art through visits and through their own work.…

  • Edinburgh’s national gallery on schedule

    Edinburgh’s annual Arts Festival has long been handicapped by the limited space available in the l9th century galleries. Now a remarkable plan steered by architect John Miller will link the ailing Royal Scottish Academy to its neighbour by means of…

  • Awfully Chris

    Chris Ofili is the first painter in ten years to have actually won the Turner Prize. His show at the Victoria Miro Gallery (ended 3 August) further consolidated his reputation. Four vast paintings fill the lower gallery, running up to…

  • Chelsea physick

    The famous SW3 sanctuary has opened its gates to contemporary art this summer. The oldest botanical gardens in Europe have invited a group of artists to make works for installation within that convey the essence both of the almost secret…

  • Buren far from boring

    Daniel Buren, the French experimental artist whose ambition since the 1960s has been to remove apparent human involvement (and error?) from painting, is currently occupying the entire sixth floor (2500 square metre) of the Pompidou Centre with 61 rooms to…

  • The mid-Atlantic sea contemporary art bubble burst

    There was one a bright new venture called Eyestorm, which would revolutionise the way the general public could buy art. It got off to a zoomy start in 1999, too late at the top of the dotcom boom. It would…

  • British Museum’s continuing cash crisis

    The real problem for the British Museum, as Suzanna Taverne said, has been the fact that the government grant has been cut by 30%.

  • Beekeeper in Swansea

    Bill Woodrow has produced an excellent thematic essay on the age-old allegorical figure of the beekeeper, on show at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea until 17 November. The elemental quality of such figures, their protective and protected engagement…

  • August high season for old master recoveries

    August high season for old master recoveries

  • Spirits raised: art in the making

    October 27 sees the opening of a major and scholarly exhibition at the National Gallery, London. Images have been retrieved from the underdrawings to major oil and tempera works by Raphael, Brueghel and Cranach the Elder, and Carlo Crevelli, as…

  • Matisse Picasso

    One of the finest exhibitions of many years, it is a collaboration between the Tate, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée Picasso with the Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, New York

  • Daniel Libeskind: Imperial War Museum at Salford, Manchester

    Daniel Libeskind’s new building, an adjunct to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, South London, is situated beside the Manchester Ship Canal in Salford. Somehow this was a perfect ‘stealth’ affair. While the launch was crowded, very few of those…

  • Stonehenge rising

    Australian architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall, originally of Melbourne but now well-established in London, will at last see their competition-winning design for the environs of Stonehenge get built. The target, for completion is to be 2008. The 7000-acre Stonehenge site…

  • Sickert’s Secret

    A painting by Walter Sickert, entitled merely ‘One of Madame Villain’s Sons’ has been bought from Vanessa Bell’s family by the Charleston House Trust, for 24,000, dependent upon a 14,000 grant from the Art Fund charity. We are quite certain…

  • New Pavilion at the Serpentine

    The new Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, designed by the Japanese master Toyo Ito, has been drawing in crowds in the unseasonably warm late July climate. One cannot miss this perforated box. White and structurally heavy in steel…

  • Monument of the North online

    A new website entitled Monument has gone online based in Newcastle. Two Francisco-based net artists came over to Newcastle thinking there was real documentary film to be made about the city’s cultural history. However, Monument actually shows a selection of…

  • Diana’s space

    The announcement by Tessa Jowell on 31 July, that the scheme chosen to be commissioned to build the memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales in Hyde Park is that of the American landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson is entirely the…

  • New wrap for Auntie: BBC unveils building plans

    At a time when most organisations are throwing in the sponge and moving out to the periphery of their home city, the BBC has unveiled dramatic new plans by Sir Richard MacCormac of MacCormac Jameson and Pritchard to concentrate key…

  • Masters of Colour: Derain to Kandinsky

    Only 30 years ago, Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher began to form a collection of early 20th century art that has become one of the finest yet least known private collections of modern art in the world

  • Sweden’s English immigrant returns again

    After Nordgren’s Baltic, it is timely to remember the act of faith in 1960s Newcastle which brought back Ralph Erskine from Sweden in time to prevent the wholesale collapse of the housing community at Byker along the North side of…

  • Kaiser Bill still

    Great yawns have greeted the seemingly inevitable decision voted through by the German Parliament, in their Foster-designed high-tech redoubt at the Reichstag, to rebuild the 18th century Baroque palace of the German Emperors. Yawns, since the simulated, temporary pneumatic version…

  • Obituary: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

    Born around 1932, on the Napperby cattle station to the north of Alice Springs, Clifford Possum grew up there and also at the aboriginal settlement at Jay Creek. He began wood-carving and was stimulated by meeting the members of the…

  • Obituary: David Brown, Curator and Art Expert

    In the 1970s in Edinburgh, the then Keeper of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Douglas Hall, made a remarkable acquisition, exceeding all other such before or since. Hall’s choice in the works of artists was of course famously eclectic:…