Author: jaywp

  • Win some, lose some

    The small Utrillo painting ‘Church’ stands out in the current display of ‘lost’ works in Israel on account of the seal on the frame, ‘Feldpolizei 540’. It is still around because wherever it came from, a protective Nazi specialist moved…

  • Face to Face – The Daros Collections

    Daros Exhibitions, Zürich Part I: 5 October 2007-17 February 2008; Part II: 14 March to 7 September 2008

  • That Man from Rio: Celebrating Oscar Niemeyer’s Centennial

    Considered to be Brazil’s most important architect, Oscar Niemeyer (b.1907) is also a major figure in the development of modern architecture internationally. He has become a symbol for his country for many reasons: he designed the national capital, Brasília, founded…

  • Book review: Doorway

    Simon Unwin London & New York: Routledge, 2007 With this third architectural/typological monograph, Professor Simon Unwin has completed what is effectively a trilogy. The first two works were Analysing Architecture and An Architectural Notebook: Wall. Both these works were essentially…

  • From Russia

    French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg Royal Academy of Arts until 18 April

  • John Bellany, Exhibition of Portraits

    Gainsborough House, Sudbury Opens June 2008

  • The Danish Gift

    In 1974, following a visit to the Furniture Fair in Copenhagen, the question was raised, How will Denmark follow the work of Borge Mogensen, Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner and Verner Panton, whose designs seemed so classically timeless that it was…

  • Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group

    Tate Britain, London 13 February–5 May 2008

  • A gift horse in the mouth: the Artists Rooms project and the d’Offay bequest 2008

    On 27 February 2008 a major announcement was made at Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Before the assembled British art luminaries, news was announced of possibly the greatest art bequest of the twentieth century and to date. Anthony d’Offay…

  • Book review: Pallasmaa phenomenon

    Archipelago: Essays on Architecture for Juhani Pallasmaa Peter MacKeith (ed) Helsinki: Rakennustieto/Building Information Ltd, 2006

  • Richard England: Architect as Artist

    Dennis Sharp (ed) London: BookART, 2007 Dennis Sharp has produced this well-prepared monograph to coincide (approximately) with England’s 70th birthday. Launched earlier in February 2008 at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, it comes at a time when…

  • Down Among the Bowery Boys

    The New Museum of Contemporary Art (Lower East Side, Manhattan)

  • Revisiting Juan Soriano in Philadelphia

    An interview with Edward J. Sullivan Mexican artist Juan Soriano is an intriguing figure among the personalities animating the history of Mexican art and literature following the Revolution. Although the charismatic artist influenced and affected his better-known contemporaries (eg Diego…

  • Book review: The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History

    Bernard Smith Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2007 According to the Australian art historian Bernard Smith, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History, is ‘probably his last book’. At 91, he is probably right. What is certain is…

  • That wrecking tendency

    The British Council has offended over 100 of Britain’s leading artists, including such luminaries as Rachel Whiteread, Peter Blake, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sir Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert and George and the Chapman Brothers, backed up by a phalanx of leading gallery directors;…

  • Dance for joy

    It is nothing short of miraculous that the Royal Academy’s blockbuster show ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg’ is now open at last, up and running, swirling and dancing like the figures in…

  • Bottom line in culture

    The latest fad exciting national UK enthusiasts up and along Downing Street is a proposal for a £100 million National Museum of British History. Guess who is running this idea? Our personable former Minister of Education Kenneth Baker, now Lord…

  • An Exhibition of Event Photography

    ‘Written by the Photographs: Art History’ Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany 8 December 2007-2 March 2008 For anyone interested in the ways in which a photograph can aspire to the condition of a work of art, there is an exhibition…

  • From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price

    Stanley Mathews London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. There can be few architects who have built so little but have had such an influence on architecture thinking in the second half of the 20th century as Cedric Price, forever associated with…

  • NeoCraft Conference

    The NeoCraft Conference held in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of November had a very ambitious programme, ranging from looking at the traditions and innovations in aboriginal crafts in…

  • The Art of Nothing: Ivo Mesquita and the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo

    The ‘Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo’ is now one of the major international displays of contemporary art, along with two other grand showcases of modern and contemporary art; the estimable ‘Venice Biennale’, first held in 1895; and ‘Documenta’…

  • Book review: Marvellous Melbourne

    Design City Melbourne. Leon van Schaik. John Wiley & Sons, 2006. This important city monograph was first published over a year ago, but it is exemplary within the ‘World City’ genre beyond those established by Academy Group in the 1990s…

  • Book review: Heterotopic visions

    Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modelling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory by David Grahame Shane London: Wiley, 2006 Increasingly, contemporary artists, as much as architects and urban planners, have to grope for a clearer understanding of the nature of cities…

  • Seduced by the Oldest Topic in the World

    Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now Barbican Arts Centre 12 October 2007–27 January 2008 Sex is an extremely popular subject, but ‘sex appeal’ is nearly impossible to define. People seem to seek this elusive quality in everything they…