Author: jaywp

Martin Bailey, a Van Gogh specialist, believes he has proved that a so-called missing portrait by Van Gogh, found hanging in a private collection in Oklahoma, is genuine. The portrait is of a young Glasgow art dealer, Alexander Reid, who…

Exhibitions of Surrealist art just come and go. The Hayward Gallery has mounted a new show, entitled ‘Undercover Surrealism’. The show focuses on a magazine, Documents, edited by the notorious Georges Bataille. This was a weird enough product of such…

The renowned Viennese architect, Harry Seidler, died in early March of this year. An itinerant Modernist in his early career, he soon settled in Sydney, and had a profound and formative effect on Australian modern design. He also, as architect…

The refurbishment of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice is taking a new turn. Once owned by Fiat, the Agnelli combine of the day made possible the superb, massively encyclopaedic celebration of Futurism, ‘Futurismo & Futurismi’ (1986) in the Palazzo, organised…

The Musée de l’Orangerie at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris has created a brilliant coup in opening up the galleries by the removal of a poorly judged, second level gallery. Claude Monet’s extensive painting of water lilies had always been…

The American architect, Richard Meier, recently completed a somewhat controversial museum in Rome. The Ara Pacis Museum is designed to house only one exhibit in its off-white sheath (all Meier buildings tend to be white modern). There stands the exhibit,…

Well, this is what critic and author Mel Gooding sets his flag on. Hoyland was feted earlier in his career by John Russell and sprang into prominence in the 1960s. He has been absorbed into London life; however, his trajectory…

The exhibition ‘La Force de l’Art’ is intended to demonstrate the continuing wealth of French artistic talent through 200 works by contemporary artists born or resident in France. It is the special project of the French Prime Minister, Dominique de…

It seems, notwithstanding the dramatic and soul-searching (and mind-blocking) rehang at Tate Modern, that the gentler approach of the Van Abbe Museum provides a no less powerful vindication of modern art. This is timely, since, this year, the Eindhoven museum…

The English architect, David Chipperfield, has completed a new museum of German literature in Marburg. This is a part of the Schiller Archive there. The building is reduced to a poetic transformation of glass and concrete; yet, curiously but appropriately,…

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a brilliant luminary who was a formidable influence in Europe and England, in the period up to 1935. After that brief sojourn in London, he left for the United States, where he died prematurely in November 1945.…

The remarkable exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings currently causing major traffic congestion around the British Museum (through 25 June) raises the question of capacity control. The viewer has to be determined in this sardine syndrome. The drawings for the most part…