Archive

  • Fleming’s notes continue

    A new gallery and a longstanding art collection opened last month in Berkeley Street, London. A flood of nightingales sang all night in Berkeley Square, stimulated perhaps by the strain of bagpipes from the doors of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation,…

  • Demarco returns

    This month, Richard Demarco reports here on a dramatic return visit to the Poland of Stanislawski, Borowski, and Kantor. Holder now of the Gold Order of Merit, Demarco is at last reaping the harvest of long years of travail and…

  • Tell that to Andy

    The phenomenal marketing jamboree associated with the current Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern would have brought a diffident smile to Andy Warhol if he could have seen it all. After the modest 10 entry fee (plus concessions) the 2,500 average…

  • American Beauty

    From the ‘American Sublime’ (at Tate Britain) to the beautiful at Tate Modern. The comments of UK leading critics have been many-thonged. ‘It’s a dumb deal: Andy Warhol was a lot smarter than Tate Modern’s disappointing retrospective lets on’, said…

  • Letter from Poland

    Thursday 14 February The day’s programme began with 10 am meeting at the office of Andrzej Sontag, the Director of the Lodz Region for the Department of Culture, Education and Sport. Also present was his colleague and deputy, Marian Labedziv,…

  • American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880

    Tate Gallery, Tate Britain, through 19 May 2002.

  • Cromwell as art enthusiast

    Cromwell as art enthusiast Only thanks to Oliver Cromwell did a very significant proportion of the art collection of King Charles I come to form the basis of the Prado Museum in Madrid. In 1649, with the king beheaded, there…

  • Arne Jacobsen Centenary

    February sees the end of the celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Danish architect and designer, Arne Jacobsen

  • Andy Warhol: A retrospective at Tate Modern

    Tate Modern, through 1 April 2002.

  • Letter from Sydney

    Nick Waterlow The year 2000 in Sydney was a hard act to follow. Every cynic – and there were many in the art world – who fled the Olympics was greeted on their homecoming with adulatory anecdotes, from the Games…

  • The authentic and the twitch: architecture, tourism and simulacrum

    Increasingly, we now seek to verify what is presented as ‘real’: we are wary of ‘simulacrum’ having perhaps enjoyed ‘something having the form or appearance of a certain thing’ or having experienced ‘mere image, a specious imitation or likeness of…

  • The Art of Ken Done

    Janet McKenzie, Sydney: Craftsman House, AU$100/ US$60/GB£50

  • Will Maclean: Driftworks

    Will Maclean’s exhibition, ‘Driftworks’ at Dundee Contemporary Arts is the finest exhibition by a contemporary artist in Scotland that I have seen in the 14 years I have lived there since coming from Australia. It coincides with the publication of…

  • Letter from Shanghai

    Ever since the Treaty of Nangking opened Shanghai to foreign trade in 1842, the city has become a trading centre not to be ignored. The setting up of the International Settlement in 1863 and free-trading concessions opened the way for…

  • The return of Wittgenstein

    Currently showing in London is a small ‘cabinet’ exhibition open to the public in the Library Print Room, Royal Academy, through 28 January. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has been a compelling figure in British intellectual life. He died in Cambridge…

  • Kirsty Wark at BBC2 Newsnight Review (Arts)

    One of the traumas of 2001 was, for UK viewers jealously treasuring the almost uniquely intelligent comment garnered by Mark Lawson in the chair of the weekly half-hour long survivor of ‘The Late Review’ (long lamented), the peripatetic replacement of…

  • Tate Britain’s birthday suits: ‘Exposed: The Victorian Nude’

    Tate Britain’s birthday suits: ‘Exposed: The Victorian Nude’

  • Liverpool tales

    Tate Liverpool opens a challenging exhibition entitled ‘Telling Tales: Narrative Impulses in Recent Art’ which displays perfect timing. The absence of narrative in contemporary art has not been much questioned this year. Perhaps, 2002 will restore this long-present element of…

  • The last Turner Prize?

    There seems little more to be said of this drama. Although Martin Creed is an appropriate winner for 2001, and Madonna in making the award administered the expletive kick-start that she was bidden to perform more skilfully than many truly…

  • Not quite the end

    Francis Fukuyama has been strident, since 11 September, in re-asserting, in the Wall Street Journal, that history is indeed foreclosed, terminally in suspense, on a drip feed, but nonetheless ‘we remain at the end of history’. There was surely a…

  • The Finland diaspora 2001

    It has been inspiring to see how, through this year, one small European nation continues to achieve a cultural impact wholly disproportionate to its small population of less than 5.5 million, one-tenth of that of the United Kingdom. Quite apart…

  • Farewell then, Chris

    Another trauma with a quiet ending was the dastardly removal of the highly successful Minister for Culture, Media, and Sport. Was it that Smith too readily favoured art over sport, reversing the interest of the majority of voters in this…

  • Edinburgh bids for a Guggenheim

    The great trajectory of the Solomon R Guggenheim Galleries continues apace. This is a great vindication of the concept of the transferable museum brand, and has confounded the sceptics. Bilbao Guggenheim has been a phenomenal success. What are the criteria…

  • Blood and lust

    There is a bloodbath in Frankfurt, and it isn’t the result of Al Quaida’s targeting of the European Bank. ‘’Blood: Perspectives on Art, Power, Politics and Pathology’, runs through until 27 January at Schirn Kunsthalle, Romerberg, Frankfurt-am-Main and at mak.frankfurt.…