Author: jaywp

  • Stonehenge rising

    Australian architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall, originally of Melbourne but now well-established in London, will at last see their competition-winning design for the environs of Stonehenge get built. The target, for completion is to be 2008. The 7000-acre Stonehenge site…

  • Sickert’s Secret

    A painting by Walter Sickert, entitled merely ‘One of Madame Villain’s Sons’ has been bought from Vanessa Bell’s family by the Charleston House Trust, for 24,000, dependent upon a 14,000 grant from the Art Fund charity. We are quite certain…

  • New Pavilion at the Serpentine

    The new Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, designed by the Japanese master Toyo Ito, has been drawing in crowds in the unseasonably warm late July climate. One cannot miss this perforated box. White and structurally heavy in steel…

  • Monument of the North online

    A new website entitled Monument has gone online based in Newcastle. Two Francisco-based net artists came over to Newcastle thinking there was real documentary film to be made about the city’s cultural history. However, Monument actually shows a selection of…

  • Diana’s space

    The announcement by Tessa Jowell on 31 July, that the scheme chosen to be commissioned to build the memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales in Hyde Park is that of the American landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson is entirely the…

  • New wrap for Auntie: BBC unveils building plans

    At a time when most organisations are throwing in the sponge and moving out to the periphery of their home city, the BBC has unveiled dramatic new plans by Sir Richard MacCormac of MacCormac Jameson and Pritchard to concentrate key…

  • Masters of Colour: Derain to Kandinsky

    Only 30 years ago, Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher began to form a collection of early 20th century art that has become one of the finest yet least known private collections of modern art in the world

  • Sweden’s English immigrant returns again

    After Nordgren’s Baltic, it is timely to remember the act of faith in 1960s Newcastle which brought back Ralph Erskine from Sweden in time to prevent the wholesale collapse of the housing community at Byker along the North side of…

  • Kaiser Bill still

    Great yawns have greeted the seemingly inevitable decision voted through by the German Parliament, in their Foster-designed high-tech redoubt at the Reichstag, to rebuild the 18th century Baroque palace of the German Emperors. Yawns, since the simulated, temporary pneumatic version…

  • Obituary: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

    Born around 1932, on the Napperby cattle station to the north of Alice Springs, Clifford Possum grew up there and also at the aboriginal settlement at Jay Creek. He began wood-carving and was stimulated by meeting the members of the…