Author: jaywp

  • Outsider Art comes Full Circle – ‘John the Painter’

    Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 12 February–8 June 2003.

  • Norman Foster to chair Alvar Aalto Committee Charitable Trust

    The Charitable Trust, launched by Lord Foster, Finnish Ambassador Mr Pertti Salolainen and other friends of Alvar Aalto’s architecture, aims to save the Viipuri Library – one of Aalto’s greatest works.

  • Letter from Memphis

    I was in Memphis, Tennessee earlier this year to lecture on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and found myself outside the gates of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. So, talking about the design icon of Glasgow, Scotland (as one had to…

  • Titian

    National Gallery, London, 19 February-18 May 2003

  • Masterpieces from Dresden

    Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy, London, 15 March-8 June 2003.

  • Guy Bourdin at the V&A. Fashion photography as art

    In the 1970s, fashion seemed to be at its lowest ebb. The 60s, when London was the style capital of the world, had passed; yet to come were the 80s and 90s when fashion would replace radical politics and rock…

  • Obituary: Joanna Drew

    Obituary: Joanna Drew Joanna Drew, a major and formative influence on British Art from the 1970s onwards died on 20 April 2003, aged 73. She became Director of Exhibitions at the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975, having first…

  • How world cultures were united

    This summer, the British Museum celebrates a quarter of a millennium of history, with a special exhibition in the Joseph Hotung Gallery of the Great Court. The exhibition is something of a curatorial squeeze, and deals with the interaction of…

  • Saatchi googol

    A crowd for the opening: Of 100 metres that Monday, 21,000, most visitors paying 8.50, filing past the Damien Hurst version Mini, nodding catnaps en route with Duane Hanson’s Traveller. The Tate Modern was hardly struggling with 100,000 visitors predictably…

  • Piper\’s tune

    At Dulwich Picture Gallery, the late John Piper’s 1930s works are on show in ‘Abstraction on the Beach’, through to 22 June 2003. This show helps to reposition Piper’s important role in the development of British Modernism, and to demonstrate…

  • Mesopotamia

    Everything moves so fast in Iraq. It’s no longer a question of ‘shock and awe’, more one of the disappearing museum inventory. In the cradle of world civilisation, the great collection of antiquities has seen looting and pillaging on a…

  • London Review of Books — Shop, Bury Place, London, WC1

    LRB has actually opened its own shop, in an amazing display of commercial acumen. First Agatha went, from Duke Street, St James’s, then Zwemmer closed in late April. The niche that was the old LRB office is now a newer…

  • Enron collection flogged off

  • Clifford\’s travels

    Sir Timothy Clifford has no difficulty these days in turning up important works that other curators and directors do not know to be under their noses. News that Sir Tim, while flicking through the bundles in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,…

  • Chapmans again

    The ‘Rape of Goya’ might be called a curatorial wheeze. In the commodification of bad taste, this peculiar show must take the prix. However, certain elements of this apparent despoliation of Goya, by damaging posthumous etchings of the master in…

  • Art eclipsed

    The Reverend Julian Spalding, maverick commentator on the decline of British Art, has published his diatribe ‘The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today’. Crisis? Art? Spalding deserves the Chapman treatment of superimposed clowning. But where, indeed, is…

  • Amber enigma

    The St Petersburg Amber Room has been remade after almost 25 years of patient restoration. Originally a gift in 1716 from King Frederick-William I of Prussia to Peter the Great, Second World War German forces shipped off 27 panels to…

  • Max Beckmann

    Centre Pompidou, Paris. 11 September 2002-6 January 2003. Tate Modern, London. 13 February-5 May 2003. MoMA QNS, New York. 26 June-29 September 2003.

  • Tate Britain reaches out

    It is fair to say that the painter Graham Sutherland is not being served well by the national galleries in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. In April, Tate Britain will offer one room of works from its own…

  • Going shopping?

    If there was any evidence to prove that art is becoming a commodity, and even more so a consumer product, the excellent exhibition running at Tate Liverpool makes the issue crystal clear. ‘Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture’…

  • NYC Sex in the City

    The Museum of Sex recently opened in New York City. Unlike the wow TV series Sex in the City, which is strangely, obliquely conservative (well, with a small ‘c’), this museum intends to show how even sex in America transforms…

  • Raphael removal risk

    The Duke of Northumberland’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’ has been sold and removed from exhibition at the National Gallery to be sent to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles: just one of a continuing series of works lost to the…

  • Gormley in China

    The 120,000 clay figures produced under Antony Gormley’s direction by 300 Chinese workers in the Huada District of Guangzhou province, are shortly to travel to Beijing, where they will be marshalled into the Forbidden City, beside Tiananmen Square. This gathering,…

  • Elgin blow to the Acropolis

    ‘Treasure’ Neil MacGregor, also the safest and most inspired pair of hands in the world of National Museums and Galleries, has finally decided to put the foot down on the peripatetic speculation about the Elgin Marbles. This dashes any possible…