Archive

  • Brit Art from the Fifties: the reality versus the myth

    Just after the war, when France had Picasso and Matisse, Giacometti and Existentialism, and Britain could only summon up the shadows of the Ecole de Paris and the ghosts of surrealism, tutors at the Slade School of Fine Art in…

  • Palazzo Ceausescu

  • National Gallery London coup

    The National Gallery’s everlasting ‘Treasure’, Neil MacGregor, will now save the British Library, where he moves shortly following his appointment after a long and successful term, outstanding for its combination of scholarship and intelligent financial acumen, untrammelled by the populist…

  • Hirst afforestation

    In a studio in the Cotswolds, close to Stroud, a megawork is gestating. A massive cube of empty carbon dioxide canisters is being put together. Damien Hirst has chosen to represent his personal emission of the gas. The completed work…

  • Coughs and sneezes after Amsterdam

    Van Gogh/Gauguin at Van Gogh Museum through June 2

  • A pelican in the wilderness – book review

    A short review does not do justice to this splendid publication by novelist Isabel Colegate, published to coincide with the exhibition ‘A pelican in the wilderness: hermits and solitude in art’ at the Holborne Museum of Art in Bath (16…

  • Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries

    Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries

  • Peter Doig 100 years ago

    Victoria Miro Gallery, London 13 April – 22 May 2002

  • Ken Kiff – book review

    Ken Kiff (1935–2001): Retrospective. Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London.

  • Gerhard Richter: Forty years of painting

    The enigma of the German painter Gerhard Richter (b.1932) is finally explored through Robert Storr’s grand exhibition this spring in New York

  • Body Worlds: Fascination Beneath the Surface

    Body Worlds exhibits human corpses: skinned, gutted, flayed, peeled, shelled, filleted, opened up – dissected in every imaginable way. The cadavers are perfectly preserved by infusion with plastics and then posed in order to enlighten as science and elevate as…

  • Walk-over

    The current chairman of Christies, Lord Hindlip, has just pulled off a dramatic coup. Christies have been engaged by the Marquess of Bath to sell an estimated £15 million worth of art and antiques from Longleat. Compared with embattled Sotheby’s,…

  • Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh

    Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh Edinburgh belongs to a special kind of city deserving of the UNESCO designation as a world heritage site. These are cities of the imagination; cities which exist on the edge, where our memories and daydreams, our histories…

  • Great day for Turner

    No, not the Turner Prize. What Sandy Nairne, Director of Programmes at the Tate Gallery, was referring to was actually the final solution for the Turner Bequest. The 30,000 works on paper and 350 canvasses left to the nation on…

  • University of gloom

    There is anguish at St Andrews University, Scotland, that Prince William is not over-enthusiastic about his time there. Perhaps art history needs to be made more inspiring. There are not many masterpieces in St Andrews (paintings we mean) and, as…

  • Rubens resurfaces

    Just when the Rubens’ world seemed to be safely recatalogued, a great masterpiece has turned up in Amsterdam, having an estimated value of up to 6 million when it is auctioned next summer. The subject is ‘The Massacre of the…

  • Moses returns

    At Galerie St Etienne, New York through 16 March (24 West 57th Street) there is a tribute to Grandma Moses. Otto Kallir gave the redoubtable Anna Mary Robertson Moses her first one-person show in 1940. This show relates to a…

  • Morgan more

    Mindful of the recent death of the French artist Balthus, it is timely to find (from this month through 21 May) amidst the exhibition ‘Pierre Matisse and his Artists’, the portrait by Balthus of Henri Matisse in the Morgan Library,…

  • MOMA rave

    The New York Museum of Modern Art survey of Gerhard Richter’s 40 years of painting is a graceful accolade to a much-loved if controversial European painter. Opened on St Valentine’s Day, and continuing until late May, Richter is a critical…

  • Massow martyr

    Ivan Massow, former Chairman, has now left the ICA, some would say as a martyr, for criticising — among other things — ‘conceptual art’. (Tom Stoppard survived his personal questioning of the phenomenology of that which isn’t. Will Massow?) Massow…

  • Lefevre\’s last summer

    The London Lefevre Gallery, a major player in the London Art scene since 1926, was announced in January to be closing its doors soon. Coming so quickly after D’Offay’s own withdrawal, a trend is well becoming apparent. The Museum world…

  • Groves of technology

    The UK-based Stanton Williams architectural practice is redeveloping Place Cornavin in Geneva: a tarmac desert in need of an oasis. The solution, Geneva-born project architect Patrick Richard has discovered, is to let high technology form the shade. Such a gateway…

  • From Goya to Bean

    UK television viewers on the first Saturday evening in March will be able to combine uniquely two cultural ‘must sees’. In the first case, BBC2 is hosting BBC4 (Digital)’s launch evening schedule, fronted up by Bob Hughe’s deeply personal ‘Goya…

  • Gone from Gagosian

    The Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea has just closed (22 February) on Cy Twombly’s thematic group of war paintings relating to the famed Battle of Lepanto of Islamic-Christian shared memory, (and shown within hailing distance of Ground Zero). The point is…