Author: jaywp

  • Martin Ramirez Masters the Secret of Time

    Until recently, few people knew much about his life in Mexico and early years in the states. Now that a biography has been pieced together, the American Folk Art Museum in New York has staged a retrospective for the artist.…

  • Wrestling with the Angel in the Modern Age

  • Superdad Obit

    Toni del Renzio has died aged 91. Truer than life always, he was born to a landed Italian family outside St Petersburg, where his father was a diplomat to the Tsarist court. He had a legendary and varied life, not…

  • Pass the Parcel

    Is free admission to Britain’s galleries and museums about to go down the tube? There is a marked tightening of the government’s attitude here, in marked contrast to the early euphoria of the Chris Smith days. It’s all beginning to…

  • No Hanging Problems at Rock

    Daniel Libeskind is quoted as being truly inspired by his erstwhile first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains as he first jetted into Denver, Colorado, to design the Denver Art Museum. The completed building does epitomise those rocks on Denver’s flattened…

  • Travelling Canaletto

    Antonio Canaletto has come to London, with an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Previously the painter of Venetian views for the Grand Tourists in Venice, his market dried up with the War of the Austrian Succession. But, apart from…

  • Fra Angelicos turn up as a surprise

    The twin paintings were discovered by the relations of a deceased retired librarian, still hanging discreetly where she left them – behind her spare room door in a modest house in Oxford. They had originally formed the altarpiece of the…

  • Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution 1760-1830

    The Royal Academy of Arts is currently hosting Citizens and Kings: Portraiture in the Age of Revolution. However, despite the British Museum’s own superb and scholarly comprehensive exhibition entitled Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (2003), there seems…

  • China Power Station: Part 1

    Battersea Power Station, London 8 October-5 November 2006

  • William Roberts: England at Play

    Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK 20 January-18 March 2007

  • Steven Holl: America’s Best Architect

    The USA has lately found and recognised the real successor to Frank Gehry in a new generation. This is New York-based artist Steven Holl. It has been some while in coming, but with the opening in June 2007 of the…

  • The Art of the Mise-en-Sc

    Cinémathèque Française, Paris 4 April-30 July 2007

  • Steven Campbell

    The death of the painter Steven Campbell on 15 August 2007 sent shock waves through the London and New York art worlds as well as his native Glasgow. His early recognition on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Pratt Institute New…

  • Mediators and Messengers: Contemporary Art in the Landscape

    The entire agenda for painting about landscape has shifted in the 21st century. Concepts and readings of the land have a weighty and protracted precedence but in the 1970s, far-reaching revisions were explored by artists. These have generated a powerful…

  • Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural

    National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2 November 2006-14 January 2007 The film and video artist Douglas Gordon had his first one-man exhibition in Britain at the Lisson Gallery in 1994, sponsored by its perceptive director Nicholas Logsdail, to which he…

  • Tracey\’s Star

    2007 will be Tracey Emin’s year. She will represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in June, competing with other nations for the Golden Lion trophy (sounds made for Tracey) and making the most of the Palladian British Pavilion, up whose…

  • Rogers on a roll, no butter

    The wine is flowing at the River Café. Since it appears that notwithstanding assurances by partner architect Marco Goldschmied (anxious to take his stake out and move off with the proceeds), the practice-owned café may not be so easy to…

  • Redundant Commonwealth Centre with Potential

    The Commonwealth Arts Centre in South Kensington is still under threat of early demolition. The official reason given is that it leaks. The fact is that it doesn’t do so. Three years ago, that was all put right by architect,…

  • Battersea Power Station Update: an Old Man River Saga

    New Chinese art will fill and fill the giant space. Already, 22 Chinese artists are free-ranging within the derelict site. Because of the considerable distances across the site, bicycles are made available to visitors (those familiar with the Beijing traffic…

  • Australian National Gallery Makeover

  • Art market trends

    The Miami Art Fair has surely reached its zenith now that Karen Wright, the formidable Editor of Modern Painters, has given her approval, having previously disavowed its lurid charms

  • Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings

    Museum of Modern Art, New York 29 October 2006-15 January 2007 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 23 February-13 May 2007 The work of American painter Brice Marden is currently showing in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern…

  • Architecture: Zaha Did It

    The development of architecture specifically for cancer outpatient healthcare has been pioneered in the UK by a group of independent operatives known as the ‘Maggie’s Centres’

  • Tales of two cities: Berlin, Dresden

    These are stirring times for architecture ‘watchers’ in Germany’s two famous cities; Berlin, the capital, and Dresden, culture capital of the south-east. The re-opening of the neo-Baroque and now restored Bode Museum in Berlin, sitting on its island and commanding…